
Class _BALt___ 



Book 



n 



Copyright N°, 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 



The Soul of a Child 



By y 
RAYMOND rf. HUSE 



' pSijttt ,3«r«I tana « tifilb, 



Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham 
New York: Eaton and Mains 



elites 



Copyright, 1914, by 
Jennings and Graham 



MAR 30 1914 

©CI.A371173 



TO 

Abbie Plumer Huse 



' Sometimes in the hush of the evening hour 
When the shadows creep from the west. 

I think of the twilight songs you sang. 
And the boy you lulled to rest. 

The wee little boy with the tousled head- 
That long, long ago was thine — 

I wonder if sometimes you long for that boy, 
little mother of minel " 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introductory Chapter, 9 

The Child's World, 16 

The Child's Philosophy, 22 

The Child's Theology, 27 

What Is a Child? 35 

The Sense of Sin, 40 

The Child's Christian Experience, 44 

Child Varieties, 52 

Christ and the Child, 57 

The Holy Spirit and the Child, - 63 

The Child and His Bible, 68 

The Prayers of a Child, .... 76 

The Call to Service, 83 

The Call to Sainthood, 89 

The Child's Dress, 96 

The Child's Food, 104 

More Food, - - Ill 

The Child's Sabbath, 121 

The Other Child, 126 

The Child and His Dreams, .... 133 

Growing Pains 139 

The Child and the Church, - 147 

The Child in the Church, 154 

The Church and the Child, .... 161 

Postlude, 166 

7 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

CHAPTER I 

Introductory Chapter 

The introduction to a book is like the front porch 
to a house. It is usually built last, and yet it is the 
design of the architect for you to enter it first. Fre- 
quently, however, you do not, but climb up some 
other way. However, we dare to express the hope 
that the reader of this book will first peruse this 
chapter, for we beg to assure him it will help to 
make the rest of it comprehensible and, like the 
strange and wonderful rhymes with which Bunyan 
was wont to prefix his immortal allegory, will ex- 
plain "Why it was writ." 

Professor Borden P. Bowne, one of the greatest 
philosophers of the century, said, "The foundation 
of all psychology is experience." We have endeav- 
ored, by turning back the pages of memory and by 
opening our hearts and minds to the voices and 

9 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

spirits of little ones who have clustered about us 
during our ministry, to reproduce here freely and 
frankly the experience of a child : and having told 
you that, we have really given you the purpose of 
our book. 

This is not a manual of pedagogy nor a volume 
of methods of work among children. Wiser spe- 
cialists than we have written many books on these 
important subjects. We have tried, as far as pos- 
sible, to avoid even the terminology that would 
characterize such studies, and only occasionally, 
when the temptation was too great, have we climbed 
into the chair of the pedagogue. We have felt that 
if preachers, teachers, and Christian workers gener- 
ally could come to see the child's soul as it is, its 
needs and its hunger, its possibilities and its glory, 
that their own eager minds and hearts would find 
a way to minister unto the least of these. Like our 
Master, we simply would take a young child and 
place him in the midst. 

The generation that neglected children has 

passed away. The theology that damned them is 

dead. The pendulum has swung far to the other 

extreme and our danger to-day is that we shall be 

10 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 

superficial in our work among them and, while say- 
ing glib words about their innocence, shut out of 
their lives, by denying its necessity, the gracious 
experience of saving grace that is their birthright. 
We need to remember to-day that to be brought 
up in the Church and trained in all the ordinances 
thereof is not enough, even though there shall be 
a scrupulous attention to the externals of moral be- 
havior. History has comparatively recent evidence 
to show that even that external morality can not 
long continue if the soul has been untouched by the 
Spirit divine. 

The old-fashioned error was to expect all re- 
ligious experience and life to be cast into the same 
iron mold. Some of us have sweat under that 
dogma and to-day rejoice in the liberty wherewith 
Christ has set us free. But we can not afford to go 
bounding over to the other extreme, and while no 
longer insisting upon the mold, also cease to insist 
upon the experience and life. And because we have 
been disturbed by a tendency in this direction 
among some who labor in Zion, we have "taken 
our pen in hand to write a few lines." With the 
optimism of an author we believe that we have 
ii 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

helped to offset this tendency by placing the child 
in the midst. 

It is hardly necessary to explain that by the soul 
of the child we mean the child. There was an an- 
cient psychology that picked the child to pieces and 
found body, mind, and soul, and some other things. 
And what they called the soul was hardly worth 
temporary existence, to say nothing of immortality. 
We are glad the tendency of the modern psychology 
is not to pick the child to pieces, but to put him 
together, to emphasize the fact that in all our study 
of consciousness and phenomena we are really talk- 
ing about the same individual. That the soul ex- 
presses itself through the body we all admit. 

Herein we sojourn 

Till in some far sky 

We lease a fairer dwelling, built to last 

Till all the carpentry of time is past. 

Only the grossest materialist would confuse the 
body with the real self. There has not been the 
same clearness always, however, about the emo- 
tional and mental machinery. We therefore wish 
to state that when we speak of the will we mean 
the soul choosing, that when we speak of the mind 
12 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 

we mean the soul thinking, that when we speak of 
the heart we mean the soul loving, and when we 
speak of the child's soul we mean the child, the 
individual, the ego, the invisible spirit self, made in 
the image of the Eternal God and Father of us all. 
Hence, when we talk of books and comrades, for 
instance, we are talking of things that touch the 
child's soul as really as do cloister and place of 
prayer. 

It has been impossible to avoid becoming auto- 
biographical occasionally. The very nature of the 
case seems to demand it as it did when Paul faced 
Agrippa. Unlike the great apostle, however, we 
have inserted our experience when it seemed to us to 
be like that of the commonality of folks rather than 
where it differed. To do this, we have felt some- 
what the embarrassment of literary style. After 
considering the case we have determined to follow 
apostolic example, and in our general treatise to use 
the always appropriate editorial "we," and when 
illustrating with some personal experience to drop 
into the third person singular, as did Paul when 
he talked about the man he "knew in Christ Jesus 
that was caught up into the third heaven." 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

We do not apologize for our frequent and 
copious quotations from the poets. We believe that 
they are, in many fine things of the spirit, safer 
guides than the theologians, and that our little book 
is richer because of these extracts. Indeed, we dare 
to think that if some do not care for the beads of 
our own that we have strung together, they may 
give our message consideration because of these 
pearls that are on the same string and preserve this 
volume as a worthy compilation of poetical quota- 
tions. Since it is customary in a preface to express 
indebtedness, we hereby record our gratitude to 
William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth 
Barrett Browning, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry 
Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ed- 
gar Allen Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frederick 
Lawrence Knowles, James Whitcomb Riley, Rich- 
ard Watson Gilder, Eugene Field, and others, all 
of whom have assisted us greatly. 

Finally, we send out our book with the prayer 
of Burnbrae in the "Bonnie Brier Bush" on our lips 
and in our hearts: "Almichty Father, we are a' 
Thy puir and sinfu' bairns wha' wearied o' hame 
and gaed awa' intae the far country. Forgive us 
14 



INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 

for we didna' ken what we were leavin' or the sair 
heart we gied oor Father. It was weary wark tae 
to live wi' oor sins, but we wud never hev come 
back had it no been for oor Elder Brither. He 
cam' a long road tae find us and a sore travail He 
had afore He set us free. He 's been a gude Brither 
tae us, and we 've been a heavy charge to Him. 
May He keep a firm hand o' us and guide us in 
the richt road and bring us back gin we wander 
and tell us a' we need tae know till the gloamin' 
come. Gather us in then, we pray Thee, and a' we 
luve, no* a bairn missing, and may we sit down for- 
ever in oor ain Father's house. Amen." 



15 



CHAPTER II 
The Child's World 

We are speaking of the normal child. There are 
those who, on account of the avarice of the rich and 
the poverty of the poor, are robbed of the priceless 
gift of a normal childhood. In their behalf Eliza- 
beth Barrett Browning wrote: 

They look up with their pale and sunken face9, 

And their look is dread to see, 
For they 'mind you of their angels in high places 

With their eyes turned on Deity. 
"How long," they say, "how long, O cruel nation, 

Will you stand to move the world on a child's heart, 
Stifle down with nailed heel its palpitation, 

And tread onward to your throne amid the mart? 
Our blood splashes upward, O gold heaper, 

And your purple shows your path; 
But the child's sob in the silence curses deeper 

Than the strong man in his wrath." 

It is a sign of social and moral progress that 
great political leaders and statesmen to-day are hear- 
ing and heeding "The child's sob in the silence," 
16 



THE CHILD'S WORLD 

and the day is sure to come when Old Glory will 
guarantee to every child his childhood. 

The child's world is wonderland. William 
Wordsworth was one time accused of not being able 
to appreciate nature. He replied with some earnest- 
ness, "I do appreciate nature, human nature." His 
keen appreciation of human nature and his splendid 
memory of child nature are clearly seen in his "Ode 
on Intimations of Immortality," even when he at- 
tempts to use that ode to bolster up a philosophy 
that in spite of his poetical crutches persists in limp- 
ing awkwardly and painfully. He says : 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 

The earth and every common sight 
To me did seem 

Appareled in celestial light, 
The glory and freshness of a dream. 

It is not now as it has been of yore ; 
Turn wheresoe'er I may, 
By night or day, 

The things which I have seen I now can see no more. 

The child's world is wonderland. When we 

revisit the old home of our childhood we are rested 

and refreshed as we climb the rolling hills, stand by 

the quiet river, or look off at the purple mountains 

17 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

in the distance. We still believe it to be the most 
heavenly spot on earth, but even with the utmost 
effort of will to re-create old moods and memories, 
we can not make it look to our world-weary eyes 
as it used to appear to the wondering gaze of child- 
hood. When we sit under the old tree, remember 
the barefoot boy who used to play there and think 
wistfully of the world in which he lived, we are 
not guilty of the foolishness of wishing to exchange 
places with that shadow boy. Our rainbow is be- 
fore us. The horizon that fascinates us is westerly, 
and not the fading glory of the deserted east. And 
yet — and yet, we would like to camp out just a 
little while in the wonder-world of childhood. 

The philosophers tell us that color is not in the 
object we are looking at, but is the effect of the 
combination of rays of light upon the eyes of him 
who looks at the object. This must account, then, 
for the green of the fields, the blue of the sky, and 
the red of the wild strawberries by the wayside in 
the world of childhood. A critic said to an artist, 
"That is a fine picture you have painted, but I never 
saw such colors in the sunset as you have there on 
that canvas." The artist replied wistfully, "Do n't 



THE CHILD'S WORLD 

you wish you could?" It took the artist's soul to 
see the beauty of the sunset. The child's world is 
only seen by the child's soul. Mrs. Browning, in- 
deed, claims that the poet also sees this world : 

The poet hath the child's 6ight in his breast 

And sees all new. What oftenest he has viewed 
He views with the first glory. 

But a careful study of the lives and productions of 
the poets of the ages leaves one with the impression 
that, save for rare moments of vision, they also were 
world-weary, and the child's soul still has the 
monopoly of wonderland. 

The child dwells in the world of phenomena. 
Thus the history of the race is reproduced in the 
life of each individual. Like our first parents, he 
dwells in his garden of Eden and views everything 
from that advantage. He has no use for Copernicus. 
The greater light is for his little day and the lesser 
light for his little night. The sky arches over his 
little world. Everything is neighborly. God Him- 
self is just above the tree-tops and comes down into 
his garden in the cool of the day. 

It is always a tragic thing when a man moves 
19 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

out of this world and his faith does not keep pace 
with his discoveries. The writer of this book re- 
members an old man in the village postoffice, who 
said: "I used to think when I looked up at the sky 
I was looking at heaven. Now I know it is only 
space." "What!" said a neighbor, who had come 
in to get his mail. "Space," he replied, with a smile 
that was sadder than tears. He might aptly have 
quoted the words of Thomas Hood: 

I remember, I remember, 

The fir trees dark and high, 
And how I used to think their lender tops 

Were close against the sky. 
'Twas childish ignorance, 

But now 't is little joy 
To know that I am farther away from heaven 

Than when I was a boy. 

It is better to dwell in a neighborly world with 
God bending over the tree-tops than in a boundless 
universe of empty space. The supreme task of the 
Christian home and Church is to lead the child 
while still in his garden of Eden to such a personal 
fellowship with his Father God that when he moves 
out into the bigger world of maturity he goes not 
without a Guide. 



THE CHILD'S WORLD 

The world of the child is a world where faith 
is reasonable and normal. Daily wonders provoke 
expectancy. Miracles are not strange to the little 
pilgrim whose world is still sparkling with the morn- 
ing dew and is itself a miracle. 

Childhood is, therefore, the divinely appointed 
time for the beginning of an experience that is de- 
pendent upon faith for its inception and fruition. 



*i 



CHAPTER III 

The Child's Philosophy 

A man's philosophy determines his theology and has 
a profound effect upon his religion. This is equally 
true of the child, who is "father of the man." 

The average child belongs to the idealist school 
of philosophy. He not only has a wonderful world 
about him, but his soul is at home in a more won- 
derful other-world. 

Across the way from our study window there 
lived a sturdy little lad of five summers and his 
sunny-faced little sister of three. One bright morn- 
ing this boy came to the front gate displaying a piece 
of tin tied to a soiled string. His face was aglow 
with pardonable pride as he said, "This is my watch 
and chain." His sister had also a look of pride, 
mingled with a little of the wistful maternal 
anxiety, which dawns early in feminine minds, as if 
she feared he would not be understood and appre- 
ciated, as she affirmed, "Yes, it is his watch and 

22 



THE CHILD'S PHILOSOPHY 

chain." The little matter-of-fact neighbor girl 
across the yard looked scornful and sneered: 
" 'T is n't. It is only a piece of tin and an old 
string." But with a flash in his eye the lad insisted : 
"It is. It is my watch and chain," and with a 
stamp of her baby foot, his loyal sister echoed, "It 
is! It is his watch and chain!" And the preacher, 
watching and musing, thought the little philosopher 
was right. He had something in his soul like the 
magic in the fingers of old Midas that turned to 
gold all it touched. A piece of tin and string, plus 
the little boy's soul, made a watch and chain of 
glittering splendor. James Russell Lowell wrote 
words dripping with life when he said: 

When I was a barefoot boy 

And dwelt in a cellar damp, 
I had n't a friend nor a toy, 

But I had Aladdin's lamp. 
When I could not sleep for the cold, 

I had fire enough in my brain, 
And builded with roofs of gold 

My wonderful castles in Spain. 

This other world is one of the joys of early 
childhood, and one of its terrors, sometimes. Fairies 
and ghosts, angels and goblins dance in fantastic 
23 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

confusion across the horizon. Santa Claus drives 
triumphantly through the air with his fleet reindeer. 

The imaginative faculty of the child's soul offers 
splendid opportunity for "reproof, correction, and 
instruction in righteousness." Crude and lazy 
parents abuse it, and in many a home there is the 
type of teaching that finds expression in the lines, 
"The goblins will get you if you do n't watch out." 
Even fathers and mothers of high ideals of parent- 
hood hardly know what to do with it. Their minds 
balance about equally between the happy memory 
of the rare joy of their childhood belief in St. 
Nicholas and the pathetic face of some little child 
who said tearfully in the hour of his disillusionment, 
"The next thing they will be telling us there is n't 
any Jesus." 

Whether or not the imagination of childhood is 
fed with fables and wonder tales, it will persist in 
making a world for itself of rose-tinted hues or 
black, terrible colors, according to childish mood. 
And as the days go by, 

The youth who daily from the east 
Must travel, still is nature's priest, 
And by the vision splendid 
Is on hia way attended. 
34 



THE CHILD'S PHILOSOPHY 

Even after he learns the unreality of much of the 
world of imagination he still finds supreme joy in 
"pretending" and "making believe." A very proper 
maiden-lady, who had a summer home in the coun- 
try, pitied the poor minister's little children in the 
bare little parsonage across the way because they 
had so few toys, — just a few sticks and stones and 
buttons. She knew so little of childhood. Those 
sticks blossomed in childish hands like Aaron's rod 
of old. Those stones were living stones. Those 
buttons were diamonds. 

Finely constructed mechanical toys are chiefly 
enjoyed by adults, who are usually disappointed to 
see how little enthusiasm they inspire in the little 
folks and how soon they are broken. The little 
maiden will admire respectfully the elegant wax doll 
that will open and shut her glassy eyes, and then 
will take the "old rag baby" to bed with her and 
smother it with her kisses. The little boy will 
watch his uncle wind up the stiff-leg horse that will 
walk, and then he will go galloping off on the 
broom-stick. 

The imaginative faculty of the child makes him 
an idealist in philosophy. He is not a slave to the 
25 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

visible. He can picture things and conceive things 
and believe in things that "eye hath not seen, nor 
ear heard." Thus things hidden from the wise and 
prudent are revealed unto babes. 

Just as the eye presupposes light and the ear 
sound, so the childish belief in the ideal and the 
invisible feels around restlessly until it discovers the 
spirit world, the heavenly home, and the Divine 
Christ. And the time to find these invisible things 
that are eternal is before the child's belief in the 
ideal has been rooted up by the everlasting tyranny 
of the external creation groaning in pain. For he 
who receives the Kingdom of Heaven must always 
receive it as a little child. 



26 



CHAPTER IV 
The Child's Theology 

When Helen Keller was first told about her 
Heavenly Father by Phillips Brooks, she replied: 
"I know Him, although I never knew His name 
before. I have felt His presence. It is like the 
warmth." The Holy Spirit had found His way 
to that little, lonesome soul, imprisoned in the dark. 
The child does not get all his theology "from men 
or by men." The God who talked to Samuel still 
speaks directly to the child soul. 

However, for the interpretation of the message 
of the "inner light" the child, like the adult, is de- 
pendent upon human teachers. There is here the 
same intertwining of the human and divine that we 
find everywhere in life, even in our Bible. 

What pastor has not wondered, as he has seen 
the eager, serious eyes of childhood turned inquir- 
ingly toward him from the pew, how many of the 
fine things he is trying to say find their way to the 
child's soul. The wise pastor does not forget the 
27 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

child. And the wise parent does not deprive his 
child of the divine message and mood of the Sab- 
bath Church service with its hush of reverence, its 
sense of the presence of the Unseen. Richard Wat- 
son Gilder starts the trains of memory moving in 
the minds of many when he says: 

How oft have I, a little child, 

Hearkened my father preaching the Word! 
Again I see those circling, eager faces, 

I hear once more those solemn, urging words 
That tell the things of God in simple phrase ; 

Again the deep-voiced, reverent prayer ascends 
Bringing to the still summer afternoon 

The sense of the Eternal. 

When we recall the pastors of the Church of 
our childhood, of all they meant to us, we feel led 
to breathe a fervent prayer that we may never offend 
one of these little ones who are looking to us as 
we looked to those men, as prophets of the living 
God. We have met these same clergymen in later 
life at Conference and elsewhere. We have talked 
with them of salaries, grade, and other common- 
places, and found them to be very human, like our- 
selves. And yet, we can never forget the time when 
their faces seemed to shine with anointing oil and 
28 



THE CHILD'S THEOLOGY 

they appeared to belong to the same world as the 
pictures of the high priests in the family Bible. 

From the Church service, from the study of the 
Bible in the Sunday school and home and the Chris- 
tian teaching that comes with it, the child gets the 
information by which he interprets the inner light, 
the material from which he constructs his theology, 
his thought of God. Of course, he does not use 
all that the preacher tells him (alas for the mature 
man who does that!), nor all that he learns from 
the lips of pious teachers and parents. He selects 
that which appeals to his childish mind and heart. 

The child's conception of God is anthropomor- 
phic. Thus again we see the history of the race 
reproduced in the life of an individual. He finds 
no difficulties in Genesis. The God who comes to 
take dinner with Abraham is the sort of God in 
which he believes. And in spite of much learned 
talk to the contrary, it has yet to be proved that 
the anthropomorphic conception of God is not an 
approach toward the truth. It is infinitely to be 
preferred to the modern pantheistic notion, which 
makes the Deity a sort of diluted divine influence 
scattered thinly through universal space. Man was 
29 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

made "in the image of God and after His likeness," 
and the divine human Christ said, "He that hath 
seen Me hath seen the Father." 

The child thinks in the terms of his own sur- 
roundings. He usually starts with his own home. 
God is like his father, only stronger and wiser and 
more sure to be right. There is one word which 
describes a child's conception of God, the same word 
that the poet-seer in Isaiah applies to the Christ: 
"Wonderful." Like the early earth dwellers, he is 
impressed first of all by the divine power and 
glory. Later he thinks of God's goodness and love. 
It is the things in which God is different from 
father and mother that impress the child in the 
early years. Father is not omnipotent, not quite. 
God is. Mother is not omniscient, not quite. God 
is. Then, as the child years go by, and the little 
pilgrim proceeds westward on the rugged life jour- 
ney, he learns to think of those qualities which 
father and mother possess to a limited degree and 
which come to their fullness in the great soul of 
the Infinite God, righteousness and love. 

The first of these is revealed, partially, at least, 
by that spark of celestial fire called conscience in the 
30 



THE CHILD'S THEOLOGY 

child's breast, supplemented, of course, and inter- 
preted by human teachers. 

To understand and appreciate the love of God 
the child needs not only an explanation, but an in- 
carnation. In spite of the presence "like the 
warmth," Helen Keller's soul was like a storm- 
tossed sea until her wonderful Teacher came. The 
world was lost and lonesome until the Christ came. 
Herein lies the great motive for Christian missions. 
Here is the necessity of the gospel. It is pathetic 
for a child to go through the beautiful valley of 
childhood without being told the good news by rev- 
erent lips and impressed with its reality by Christ- 
like lives. 

John Greenleaf Whittier, in his own inimitable 
way, tells how the child soul hungers for just this 
combination : 

In the minister's morning sermon 
He had told of the primal fall. 

And how thenceforth the wrath of God 
Rested on each and all. 

And how of His will and pleasure 

All souls save a chosen few 
Were doomed to the quenchless burning, 

And held in the way thereto. 

31 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

Yet never by faith's unreason 

A saintlier soul was tried, 
And never the harsh old lesson 

A tenderer heart belied. 

And after the painful service, 
On that pleasant Sabbath day, 

He walked with his little daughter 
Through the apple bloom of May. 

Sweet in the fresh, green meadows 
Sparrow and blackbird sung; 

Above him their tiny petals 
The blossoming orchards hung. 

Around on the wonderful glory 
The minister looked and smiled, 

"How good is the Lord who gives us 
These gifts from His hand, my child! 

"Behold in the bloom of the apples 
And the violets in the sward 

A hint of the old lost beauty 
Of the garden of the Lord." 

Then up spake the little maiden, 
Treading on snow and pink: 

"O father, these pretty blossoms 
Are very wicked, I think ! 

"Had there been no Garden of Eden, 
There never had been a fall, 

And if never a tree had blossomed, 
God would have loved us all." 

32 



THE CHILD'S THEOLOGY 

"Hush, child," the father answered; 

"By His decree men fell: 
His ways are in clouds and darkness, 

But He doeth all things well. 

"And whether by His ordaining 

To us cometh good or ill, 
Joy or pain, or light or shadow, 

We must fear and love Him still." 

"O, I fear Him," said his daughter, 
"And I try to love Him, too, 

But I wish He was good and gentle, 
Kind and loving as you." 

The minister groaned in spirit 
As the tremulous lips of pain 

And the wide, wet eyes uplifted 
Questioned his own in vain. 

Bowing his head, he pondered 
The words of the little one: 

Had he erred in his life-long teaching? 
Had he wrong his Master done? 

To what grim and dreadful idol 
Had he lent the holiest name? 

Did his own heart, loving and human. 
The God of his worship shame? 

And lo ! from the bloom and greenness 
From the tender skies above, 

And the face of his little daughter, 
He read a lesson of love. 

33 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

No more as the cloudy terror 

Of Sinai's mount of law, 
But as Christ in the Syrian lilies 

The vision of God he saw. 

And when the hungry heart of childhood has 
received the gospel of the love of God, the satisfied 
possessor thereof sets an example of confiding tnist 
to those who have lived long to see the goodness of 
God in the land of the living. 



34 



CHAPTER V 
What Is a Child? 

In the grim old Calvinistic days the ready answer 
would be, "A little sinner!' and most parents and 
teachers have times when they feel like accepting 
the Calvinistic theory. 

Isaac Watts was wont to sing : 

Soon as we draw our infant breath 
The seed of sin springs up to death. 

And for many weary generations, in New Eng- 
land especially, sensitive childhood was obliged to 
drag around the millstone of the belief in inherited 
sin. The practical result of this unethical notion 
was that children were always counted as outside 
the fold of Christ, there to await renewing grace, 
miraculously given, that should bring them in. 
And the practical result of this theological fiction 
has lingered long after the theory itself has been 
discarded by thoughtful minds. 

A sinne- at least in popular speech, is a person 
35 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

who has sinned or is sinning; usually both. The 
new-born babe sleeping in his mothers' arms or the 
irresponsible child playing in the sunlight can not 
be counted in this class. Needless to say, the child 
can prove an alibi as far as the performance in 
Eden is concerned and all the sad sequence of events 
from that day to this. 

We can not affirm, however, as do some child- 
lovers, that the child is born a Christian. Such a 
conception robs that historic word of all the ethical 
significance it has had from the days of Antioch. 
Regeneration on the one hand is not a passive state 
of innocency, but is the result of the inflow of the 
Spirit Divine in response to intense and character- 
making moral choice. On the other hand, this ex- 
perience, so gracious and heavenly, the source of our 
certainty and our song, is not given to repenting 
transgressors only, and we rob the wistful child of 
his heritage in grace when we deprive him of its 
blessings by acting as if it did not apply to his case. 
It is not necessary for him to know the stain and 
sting of sin in order to know what it means to be 
born of the Spirit, but it is necessary for him to 
personally choose to open his heart to the eager 
36 



WHAT IS A CHILD? 

Christ. To quote from Prof. Olin A. Curtis: 
"Our teaching as to the guiltlessness of infants, true 
as that teaching certainly is, should never be al- 
lowed to change our point of stress. With much 
care to avoid artificial hothouse forcing we should 
insist that every child under our influence needs 
(to the full extent of understanding and ability) 
to give his heart in actual submission to his Savior." 

Therefore, the child at life's beginning, in spite 
of what the theologians and the pedagogues may 
say, is just what he seems to be to his mother — 
not a sinner yet — thank God ! — and not a Christian 
yet — but a child with a soul like an unblown rose- 
bud, and the key to his character and destiny in his 
tiny baby hand. 

What of depravity? There is no doubt he has 
some of it. Part of it he received as his racial 
heritage from "That man whose guilty fall cor- 
rupts the race and taints us all." Even more of 
it as his family heritage he has received from his 
father's ancestors and his mother's family. The 
iron-bound law of heredity is one of the mysteries 
of God's wonderful universe. It serves as our peda- 
gogue to lead us to Christ, for it is this intense 
37 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

consciousness of moral wrongness and need of divine 
help which brings us to the cross and the upper 
room- 
While with human nature as it is, depravity 
can never be left out of our books on childhood, 
it is also true that with divine nature as it is there 
is one other old-fashioned term that belongs here 
also, prevenient grace. The Spirit of God is given 
in gracious abundance to every child. As in Bun- 
yan's parable, the man with the oil is constantly 
replenishing the divine fire in child souls. Pre- 
venient grace, supplemented by Christian teaching, 
so offsets the effects of inherited depravity that the 
child soul turns as naturally to Christ as the flower 
to the sunlight. While Christian character is not 
attained without ethical struggle, the beginnings of 
the life divine are as natural as the sunrise of a 
new morning, and "heaven lies all around us in our 
infancy." 

Regarding those little children who, in the bud- 
ding beauty of childhood, go out from us to the 
great Unknown, whatever the creeds of the cen- 
turies may have said, our hearts feel instinctively 
the truth of the Master's words that, "In heaven 
38 



WHAT IS A CHILD? 

their angels do always behold the face of My 
Father." 

"My Lord hath need of these flowerets gay," 

The Reaper said, and smiled; 
"Dear tokens of the earth are they, 

Where He was once a Child. 

"They shall all bloom in fields of light, 

Transplanted by my care, 
And saints upon their garments white 

These sacred blossoms wear." 

And the mother gave in tears and pain 

The flowers she most did love. 
She knew she should find them all again 

In the fields of light above. 

O, not in cruelty, not in wrath, 

The Reaper came that day: 
'Twas an angel visited the green earth 

And took the flowers away. 



CHAPTER VI 
The Sense of Sin 

Eugene Field, the poet of childhood, says: 

Supposing you have been bad some day 

And up to bed are sent away, 

From mother and the rest; 

And supposing you ask who has been bad, 

You will hear what's true, 
For the wind will moan in its ruefulest tone, 

"Yoo-oo, Yoo-oo, Yoo-oo." 

Do you not, gentle reader, remember that night? 
You had been bad, and no one knew it but your- 
self. Mother knew nothing about it. At least, 
you thought that was the case. And you went up- 
stairs and tried to go to sleep. You tried to say, 
"Now I lay me down to sleep," and could n't. It 
stuck in your throat. You tried to go to sleep with- 
out saying it, and you could n't do that. Your 
pillow was so hot you turned it over, and it was 
just as hot on the other side. There was a little 
clock on the mantel that seemed to be sharply tick- 
ing, "You did it, You did it, You did it." A patch 
40 



THE SENSE OF SIN 

of white moonlight was on the floor. In through 
the open window, with exaggerated loudness, came 
the hundred sounds of the summer night. In your 
turbulent soul was mankind's age-long storm; in 
your childhood's cup humanity's age-long bitterness. 

Finally, you could not stand it any longer and 
you got up and pattered into mother's room and 
half sobbed, "Mamma, are you awake?" And she 
was awake. She was always awake when you 
needed her. Then you burst out, "O mamma, I 
did it, and I 'm sorry." She put her arms around 
you and cried a little; she felt the beginnings of 
your life tragedy. You cried, too, and felt better 
for it. With her kiss of forgiveness moist on your 
brow you went back to bed, said your prayer, and 
were asleep almost as soon as your head had touched 
the pillow. 

Let no one who remembers experiences like that 
deny to the child the possibility of knowing what 
it means to have godly sorrow for his sins. Indeed, 
it may be questioned if ever in after life does one 
know repentance so genuine and full of ethical sig- 
nificance as we find in the tender heart of the un- 
hardened child. 

4i 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

Moreover, the sense of sinfulness, the sense of 
racial wrongness is strong in the child, as he who 
remembers will know. We hardly need to repeat 
again the statement that the child is not born a 
sinner. No shadow of guilt is on his white soul. 
But he is born into a race that is out of harmony 
with God. How it became thus it is not the pur- 
pose of this volume to say. It is evident, as A. J. 
Hough, the poet-preacher of Vermont, says, that 
"somewhere man had a fall. For there are several 
of him living down upon our street who, with lov- 
ing hands to help them, have n't yet got on their 
feet." And the sense of this wrongness is strong 
in the child. 

Topsy, in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," was, of course, 
a creature of bad environment and training. More- 
over, the dark tragedy of a downtrodden race shone 
from her dark eyes. But what child has not felt 
like repeating her characteristic remark, "I'se so 
wicked." The writer of these lines well remembers 
the tragic times of his boyhood, when it seemed as 
if there came up from some hidden geyser hot, 
naughty thoughts and feelings, for which he felt 
responsible and guilty, and yet before which he was 
42 



THE SENSE OF SIN 

almost helpless. He had not then read the words 
of the great apostle, but he knew well the ex- 
perience he was describing when he wrote: "When 
I would do good, evil is present with me. I find 
another law in my members bringing me into cap- 
tivity to the law of sin and death." It was Har- 
riet Beecher Stowe who exclaimed, "Nature is a 
first-class Calvinist." And although we have long 
since rejected the theories of Calvin and Edwards, 
we have to recognize that we find in human nature 
to-day the same qualities which led them to their 
drastic conclusions. The difference is that now-a- 
days we use them as the stuff our psychology is 
made of rather than the foundations of our the- 
ology. 

The important thing, as far as this chapter is 
concerned, is to remember that the tender heart of 
the thoughtful child of the Christian home feels 
his moral need of forgiveness and the sanctifying 
grace of God. Unless he has help from outside 
himself his days can not be "bound each to each 
by natural piety." 



43 



CHAPTER VII 

The Child's Christian Experience 

In that charming story of old New England life, 
"Oldtown Folks," Harriet Beecher Stowe tells of 
a faithful pastor who said to a noble young man, 
"My son, is it not about time you gave your heart 
to God?" "I have given my heart to God," was 
the quiet, earnest reply. "I am very glad," said 
the preacher. "When did you do it?" "I have al- 
ways done it/' said the young man. This is the 
ideal toward which all Christian parents and teach- 
ers should strive. A single year wasted in selfish- 
ness and sin is a tragedy. 

The Christian experience of a child is not so 
much a matter of dates and times and seasons as 
that of the adult. We wish here to enter our pro- 
test against embarrassing the child Christian by 
asking him when he was converted. When a man 
has spent years outside the fold, has lived the 
Christless life, and comes to the definite conclusion 
to turn to the Lord and seek salvation, of course 
44 



CHILD'S CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 

he will have a red mark on the calendar, possibly 
also on the clock. His habits are formed, his life 
course is fixed. He gathers himself together, as 
it were, in one grand crisis, and chooses to follow 
the Christ, while the angels sing above him and 
his soul sings within him; but a child who is con- 
structing his life instead of reconstructing it, has 
a new crisis every morning. He will go forward 
for prayers every opportunity, go sincerely and 
eagerly, and feel his little heart warmed by the 
Spirit divine. The mathematical evangelist will 
write his name down in his book and send in the 
number to the Church paper. The anxious pastor 
will sigh and say: "I am afraid he doesn't realize 
what he is doing. He came last week, also." Both 
are mistaken, the evangelist who claims him as his 
convert and the pastor who sighs. Last week the 
child gave himself to God for last week. This 
week he is in a new world, and he has grown some, 
so he is a new child, and he does it again. And 
our good Father, God, smiles on him every time 
and loves him freely. 

"When, then, is he converted?" some one asks. 
We reply in the words of the apostle: "Ye ob- 
45 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

serve times and seasons. I am afraid of you." 
The child's conversion is the habit of his life to 
turn from his sin and his sinfulness to our Christ. 
Happy the child who begins that habit in those 
blessed early years, concerning which we have few 
recollections in later life, although those wt have 
are golden, and continues it through the unfolding 
years. It is worth more than a crisis after years 
of selfishness and sin. 

The regenerating grace of God, according to 
the unfolding faith and loyalty of the child, finds its 
way to the child heart, grows with his growth, 
buds and blossoms and fruits with the ripening 
years. The daily manifestation of this grace is well 
expressed by Mary Willard in that fascinating bi- 
ography, "Nineteen Beautiful Years." "God com- 
mands me to love Him with all my heart, and I 
think I can do it, if I am helped." Daily help in 
loving God is a good evidence of regeneration. And 
the inner consciousness of divine sonship, the "wit- 
ness of the Spirit," comes like the dawning sun- 
rise, or bursts on the child's soul in vision after 
vision; for the child Christian, instead of being de- 
prived of the revelations of grace and glory, given 
46 



CHILD'S CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 

to the deep-dyed sinners seeking pardon, has more 
of them, because his vision is clearer and his soul 
less sodden, and more sensitive to spiritual impres- 
sions. 

After an old-time camp-meeting exhortation in 
which the various steps to salvation were logically 
outlined and chronologically described, an old Eng- 
lish local preacher arose and said, in substance, "I 
think these are all in the cup; repentance, faith, 
pardon, regeneration, etc., and we have to drink it 
all, but I did n't take them in just that order. I 
think I repented more after I was forgiven." The 
chronology of Christian experience is, after all, not 
so important as we sometimes think. The im- 
portant thing is that on the human side there be a 
heart-deep turning to God, and on the divine side 
grace to pardon and to cleanse and bring moral 
victory. 

The writer of this little book speaks from a full 
heart. A flash of memory shows him a little boy 
sitting in a high-chair by the kitchen table watching 
his mother cook, and they talked together of the 
things of God. Perhaps that mother thought the 
most important thing she was doing that day was 
47 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

to make the pies. The boy surely thought so. But 
in reality, while that mother was molding the dough 
she was also molding the plastic stuff of a child's 
soul, and responding to the tender touch, he was 
getting the Christian attitude and the Christian 
vision. He recalls, also, a children's meeting in 
a church vestry, led by the pastor and his wife, 
in which there was a quiet row of kneeling chil- 
dren and he was one of them, and heard his own 
voice in public prayer asking God to make him a 
good boy. And he remembers he was never the 
same boy afterwards. The sins of childhood had 
no charm for him. He remembers also a day under 
an old butternut tree, with a Bible open on the 
grass, and the blue sky overhead, and the sunbeams 
stealing through the leafy tree to the pages of the 
open book, while also the sunbeams of the love of 
God came pouring into his child's soul, warming 
him to the center, and he felt rich. 

These are just some pearls that are strung on 
his memory. There are others, some experiences 
dark and pathetic, when he faced childhood's sins 
and wrongness, and tearfully sought help from 
heaven. By these experiences he came to know 
48 



CHILD'S CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 

the saving grace of God, in which he rejoices to- 
day. Unable to put a mark in the almanac or 
on the clock, like the old English local preacher 
more sincerely repentant for the sins of his youth 
to-day than when he first prayed for their forgive- 
ness, as he looks back over the years he can see as 
clearly as the most recent convert in Water Street 
Mission, where human struggle ended and divine 
help came, and exclaims with the apostle, "By the 
grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, I am what I am!" 

You ask me how I gave my heart to Christ? 

I do not know. 
There came a yearning for Him in my soul 

So long ago. 

I found earth's flowers would fade and die: 
I wept for something that would satisfy, 
And then, and then somehow I seemed to dare 
To lift my broken heart to Him in prayer. 
I do not know, I can not tell you how; 
I only know He is my Savior now. 

You ask me when I gave my heart to Christ? 

I can not tell. 
The day or just the hour I do not now 

Remember well. 
(It must have been when I was all alone) 
The light of His forgiving Spirit shone 

49 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

Into my heart, so clouded o'er with tin. 
I think, I think 'twas then I let Him in. 
I do not know, 

I can not tell you when; 
I only know 

He is so dear since then. 

You ask me where I gave my heart to Christ? 

I can not say. 
That sacred place has faded from my sight, 

As yesterday. 
Perhaps He thought it better I should not 
Remember where. How I should love that spot ! 
I think I could not tear myself away, 
For I should want forever there to stay. 
I do not know, 

I can not tell you where, 
I only know 

He came and blessed me there. 

You ask me why I gave my heart to Christ? 

I can reply: 
It is a wondrous story; listen while 

I tell you why 
My heart was drawn at length to seek His face. 
I was alone, I had no resting place; 
I heard of how He loved me with a love 
Of depth so great, of height so far above 

A human ken; 
I longed such love to share, 

And sought it then 
Upon my knees in prayer. 

50 



CHILD'S CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 

You ask me why I thought this loving Chriit 

Would heed my prayer? 
I knew He died upon the cross for me, 

I nailed Him there. 
I heard His dying cry, "Father, forgive!" 
I saw Him drink death's cup that I might live ; 
My head was bowed upon my breast in shame. 
He called me, and in penitence I came. 
He heard my prayer — 

I can not tell you how. 
Nor when, nor where. 

Why, I have told you now I 



CHAPTER VIII 
Child Varieties 

In the olden days of metes and bounds the ques- 
tion was sometimes asked, "When does a child 
reach the age of accountability?" If the answer 
were, for instance, "five years," one can see readily 
the absurdity of the situation. A child four years, 
eleven months and twenty-nine days old would not 
be "accountable," but some time in the night before 
his fifth birthday he would sail serenely across the 
invisible equator. 

There can, of course, be but one answer to this 
old question, "That depends upon the child." Na- 
ture, that never produces duplicates, shows in noth- 
ing greater variety than in children. We shall, 
therefore, expect to find in child souls what Pro- 
fessor James calls "varieties of religious experi- 
ence." As we have already stated, the child comes 
into the world with a racial heritage. Just as we 
see in a single dewdrop the whole landscape — blue 
52 



CHILD VARIETIES 

sky, green field, and busy city — so in the solitary 
child soul we see human history. The age of 
savagery, the age of stone, the age of dawning 
civilization, the fall of Adam, the hot resentment of 
Cain, as well as countless things bright and beauti- 
ful all through the tragic past appear in the biog- 
raphy of child. It is a fearful thing to be born. 
Yet all but the misanthrope are glad for the thrill- 
ing venture of life. And since Christ came there 
is hope and healing "far as the curse is found." 

Moreover, every child receives also a family 
heritage. That study in heredity, "The Jukes and 
the Edwardses," shows us two families on American 
soil, side by side, like two rivers flowing through 
the land, the one producing in generation after 
generation criminals and dependents, the other 
preachers and teachers and statesmen! 

One of the most fascinating studies in Amer- 
ican biography is the story of the Beechers. Brave 
old Lyman Beecher blazed his way into the in- 
visible and led all his children in after him. The 
result gave rise to the saying, "There are three 
kinds of nature: divine nature, human nature, and 
the Beecher family." 

53 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

And besides all this there is the greater mys- 
tery of a Jacob and an Esau 'neath the same family 
roof, nestling in the same mother's arms. Specu- 
lations as to what determines this difference are 
extremely popular to-day, but only Almighty God 
knows the secret. 

The sense of sin mentioned in a previous chap- 
ter comes much earlier to some than to others, 
comes with more overwhelming force to some than 
to others. A Puritan ancestry helps. A home in 
which the day of judgment is wholesomely near 
has its influence. A Church and community in 
which right is king helps to grow a conscience in 
the little citizens thereof. Children are very sensi- 
tive to atmosphere. The Christian experience of a 
child is much determined by his environment. The 
Epworth rectory gave us John Wesley. We see, 
therefore, we can have no cast-iron molds for the 
religious experience of a child. While we have 
tried to confine our discussion to what we consider 
the normal experience of a child of the Christian 
Church and home, we realize that it is still true 
that each child soul must be handled separately. 
54 



CHILD VARIETIES 

At this point lies the danger in evangelistic meet- 
ings for children, decision days in the Sunday 
school, and other movements where people move 
en masse. Two children may stand side by side, 
kneel at the same altar, or sign the same card, and 
yet not see the same vision, nor in the deep places 
of the soul mean at all the same thing. We would 
not discourage such movements or meetings, but we 
believe they should be preceded and followed by the 
most careful personal work. In the meantime, it 
might be well for both evangelists and pastors to 
be fairly modest in their bookkeeping. 

And while we say "personal work," we recog- 
nize the fact that there is also a sense in which no 
third party can adjust the relations of a child's soul 
to its God. Because child nature is so plastic it 
is not well to presume upon it. Horace Bushnell 
said that it was a characteristic of his early home 
that its atmosphere was full of Christliness, but 
each child was left free to make his own personal 
choice to follow the Master and profess the faith. 
The human will is such a delicate thing it can not 
be roughly turned by some outside party like the 
55 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

cranic of an automobile. This "let alone" policy, 
however, would be dangerous if applied to every 
case. Here again it depends on the child. We 
conclude with the statement of an old New Eng- 
land deacon who was wont to remark, "We all have 
our peculiar-rarities." 



S6 



CHAPTER IX 

Christ and the Child 

A thoughtful boy one time startled his Sunday 
school teacher with this question, "Are God and 
Jesus two different men?" Generally speaking, 
this is a problem that does not puzzle childish 
brains, the child feeling intuitively the mystery and 
the wonder of God in Christ, reconciling the world 
unto Himself. 

Which Person of the Godhead appears to the 
child nearest and most real, is doubtless determined 
by the atmosphere in which he lives. In the old 
New England days, when thought and teaching 
were saturated with Old Testament conceptions 
and ideals, and fathers prayed at morning worship 
to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the 
First Person of the Trinity would naturally be the 
center of thought and of worship. Small wonder 
that the children of those homes became pious Uni- 
tarians. The theological reaction really set in when 
Lyman Beecher brought to his manse to be the 
57 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

mother of his children that charming woman whom 
Harriet Beecher Stowe characterizes as a devout 
Christ-worshiper. If Divine Providence were plan- 
ning to transform the theological climate of a con- 
tinent, He could not do better than to drop a 
woman like her down into a parsonage full of 
Beechers. Both the children whom she came to 
mother and those who later were born of this wed- 
lock imbibed her thought and her spirit. Many 
years afterward Lyman Beecher's gifted son, the 
immortal Henry Ward, exclaimed, "Who is my 
God? Christ Jesus is His name. All that there 
is of God to me is bound up in that name. A 
dim and shadowy effulgence rises from Christ, and 
that I am taught to call the Father." This ex- 
treme statement of the impulsive prophet of Plym- 
outh Church would hardly be accepted as com- 
plete and satisfactory by Christian thinkers to-day. 
We believe that through Christ we have access 
to the Father and come to know Him so that we 
say with the beloved John, "Our fellowship is with 
the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ." Yet 
there has never been a time since the Christ first 
came when the thought of His Church was so cen- 
58 



CHRIST AND THE CHILD 

tered on Him as to-day. We are not so eager to 
analyze Him as were the theologians of old. We 
can never explain Him, but we can know Him and 
love Him. 

This is a very happy environment for the child. 
The child is very much like the people Samuel 
Hadley, of Water Street Mission, used to tell 
about. He would exclaim: "What do we tell 
these poor fellows who come into our mission seek- 
ing help? We just tell them about Jesus. Don't 
we tell them about God? Not much at first. 
Don't we tell them about the Holy Ghost? Not 
at first. A man has to be quite a way along in 
Christian things before he can understand a ghost, 
but Jesus was a Man. He could understand Him." 
And Jesus was a Child. He knows all the wonders 
and the tragedies of the child soul, not by the cool 
searchlight of omniscience, but by the warm mem- 
ory of experience. He always was the Friend of 
children. What other religious teacher of the ages 
could the artist paint with the children clustering 
around him? Mohammed with his dark scar and 
bloody sword would not fit into that picture. 
Buddha and Confucius would think it contemptible, 
59 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

but Jesus thinks it is glorious, and when the dis- 
ciples protest He utters those immortal words, 
"Surfer the little children to come unto Me, and 
forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of 
Heaven." Under the blessed spell of the Christo- 
centric teaching of Bible, school, Church, and home, 
and under the gracious leadership of the Holy 
Spirit, the child finds the attitude of the Christ 
of history to be the eternal attitude of the ever- 
living Christ. Therefore he finds it easy to draw 
nigh to Him. 

We knew a boy who, by reading the gospel in 
the mellow shining of the inner light God kindled 
in his soul, was early led to see the glory of God 
in the face of Jesus Christ. With the child's 
tendency to picture things, drawing partly doubt- 
less from his memory of portraits in Sunday school 
papers and illustrative Bibles, and partly from his 
own imagination which was apt to run at riot, but 
which in this case was softened and chastened by 
reverence, not with pen or with crayon, but for 
the eye of the mind, he pictured for himself the 
face of the Christ. It was in the golden summer 
time, and as he spread hay, helped make the load, 
60 



CHRIST AND THE CHILD 

and did the commonplace errands of a boy, oft 
and again he would look up at the cloud-swept 
blue of the July sky and he would seem to see that 
Face looking down upon him with a heavenly smile 
of approval, and lo! life lost its commonplaceness 
at once and the ordinary path of duty seemed a way 
of glory! When impatience and anger surged hot 
within him he would find himself cooled and 
steadied by the thought of that Face. He was but 
a boy, and like the children of Israel he needed 
pictures and symbols to make him remember; so 
he made this one out of the thoughts of his mind 
and the reverent affection of his heart. As the 
days went by the Face faded from the sky, he for- 
got his symbols, but the strength and beauty of 
the constant presence of the Christ stayed with his 
child soul. Sometimes, indeed, he was forgetful 
and careless, and lost his vision, but he had learned 
to sing: 

Though I forget Him and wander away, 
Kindly He follows wherever I stray. 
Back to His dear, loving arms would I flee, 
When I remember that Jesus loves me. 



6l 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

And the glimpses he had through the unfolding 
years of the glory of the ever-present Christ enabled 
him to keep contentedly to the path of virtue. With 
the sins of the flesh and sense he had no great battle. 
The more subtle contest with the sins of the spirit 
was not the blind, discouraging struggle of one who 
was led by Duty, "stern daughter of the voice of 
God," for although the symbol had faded, he caught 
ever again the vision of the glorified Face. What 
could a boy not do for Jesus' sake ? 

As he thinks of these things he is filled with 
wonder, first that with such a vision splendid he 
has so often failed in faith and hope and charity. 
And second, how so many of his friends and com- 
panions, who know not the Christ and the wonder 
of His presence and love, have been able to keep 
their integrity and their kindness. How cold and 
lonely must be the effort of child or man to be good 
without the vision of the Christ and the sense of 
His nearness! 



CHAPTER X 

The Holy Spirit and the Child 

There is a pertinent story told of the childhood 
of Gladstone. Like most stories of this sort, it is 
also told of several other great men. It is good 
enough to be true of all of them. When he was 
a lad of three years old, says the story, he went 
out into the field with a "stick" in his hand and 
saw a tortoise crawling leisurely along. With the 
savage instinct of the genus homo he raised the 
stick and was about to strike the tortoise in cruel 
sport when something within him said, "Do n't do 
that." In surprise he let his hand fall to his side 
and, rushing eagerly home, asked his mother what 
it was that said to him, "Do n't do that." His 
mother took him in her arms and with tears in her 
eyes replied, "My boy, some call it conscience, 
but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the 
soul." 

It is by such experiences as this that the child 
is introduced to the Holy Spirit. He does not 
63 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

know much about Him. Neither does the adult. 
The Spirit did not come to speak of Himself. 
After centuries of His gracious ministry He is still 
little more than what Whittier characterized as the 
"Holy Call" to the majority of Christian people. 
And this He is to the child. 

In our chapter on "The Sense of Sin and the 
Christian Experience of a Child" we have already 
seen the signs of the working of the Holy Spirit. 
Indeed, in all our consideration of the child life 
we are as near Him as Moses was to the burning 
bush. 

The "Holy Call" to the child of the Christian 
home is the call to personal allegiance and loyalty 
to Jesus Christ. 

The same boy, mentioned in the previous chap- 
ter, who saw the face of the Christ in the sky, sat 
one summer Sunday afternoon in a little country 
schoolhouse. It was the same schoolhouse that he 
attended each school day of the busy week, but 
it looked like a strange building that day. By 
the teacher's desk sat the minister; his black hair 
and careworn face are silhouetted on that boy's 
memory to-day. In front of one of the black- 
64 



HOLY SPIRIT AND THE CHILD 

boards, with his chair tipped back a little, sat the 
class-leader and sweet singer of Israel with silver 
beard and glowing face. All around in the wooden 
seats behind the long desks sat the neighbors who 
had come to worship and to listen. The boy looked 
around at his schoolmates, who had come with their 
parents and neighbors, and bashfully returned his 
bashful greeting. After the minister had finished 
his earnest exhortation he "threw the meeting 
open." One after another gave expression to Chris- 
tian faith and purpose. Then the boy felt his 
heart begin to beat wildly, and the hot blood rush 
to his cheeks. Something was telling him he ought 
to "take his stand" on the side of those who loved 
the Lord. He had never heard of a boy's speaking 
in meeting. All around his schoolmates sat ap- 
parently indifferent — it did not seem to concern 
them. There was a pause in the meeting. Now 
was the time and opportunity, but a trembling 
seized his limbs and he waited. Then they sang 
another hymn ; perhaps they would close the meeting 
now and he would not have to do it. But no, — 
another pause and the minister urged a little the 
more timid people to take part. Then the boy 
5 65 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

arose and stammered a few broken syllables of 
loyalty to Jesus Christ. They were so low one 
could hardly hear them; the old class-leader looked 
at him in a surprised way, as if he did not just 
know what happened ; he preferred to see hardened 
sinners weep their way to peace, or old soldiers 
tell how they first enlisted ; the minister's smile was 
almost indulgent, as if he were watching a child 
at play; the boy's brother said to him afterwards: 
"What did you say? I couldn't tell what you 
were saying?" The boy, perplexed a little, told 
it over to his mother, who comforted him by re- 
plying, with the intuition of spiritual motherhood, 
"You showed which side you were on." That was 
just the comfort he needed, for that was just the 
"Holy Call" to take sides with Jesus Christ; and 
all through his child-years that was what the Holy 
Spirit told him to do. 

It is the saintly Daniel Steele who calls the 
Holy Spirit the Executive of the Godhead. As 
such, He it is who "pours abroad the love of God" 
in our hearts, — as such He strengthens us with 
"all might in the inner man according to His 
glorious power, that Christ may dwell in our hearts 
66 



HOLY SPIRIT AND THE CHILD 

by faith." In this capacity also the child knows 
Him. 

Do not the memories of the years stir up your 
pure minds on this subject? Do you not remember 
in the heat of a temptation how you paused and 
prayed — and there came a wave of peace and power 
as real as the "wind that bloweth where it listeth" 
into your child soul and gave you the victory? 
Do you remember a time when, realizing your 
weakness and your need, you gave yourself to 
Jesus Christ wholly expecting Him to make you 
what you ought to be? And there came to your 
soul, and you were but a child, a blessing that 
lingers with you yet. 

Who more than the child-Christian has a right 
to sing that matchless hymn of Dr. Warren's: 

I worship Thee, O Holy Ghost, 

I love to worship Thee; 
My risen Lord for aye were lost 

But for Thy company. 

I worship Thee, O Holy Ghost, 

I love to worship Thee; 
With Thee each day is Pentecost, 

Each night nativity. 

67 



CHAPTER XI 
The Child and His Bible 

Bishop Vincent was wont to say of the Bible 
that it is like a river from which a bird may drink 
and in which an elephant may swim. The child 
is the bird that drinks from its brimming waters 
and finds them refreshing and sweet. 

The Bible is a child's Book. It is also the 
scholar's Book — indeed, it has taught more scholars 
how to think, more philosophers how to reason, and 
more "men of letters" how to spell than any other 
book known to men or angels. 

But it is also the child's Book, and the child 
is as much at home amid its fragrance as a hum- 
ming-bird in a garden of roses. 

The fact that the old Bible stories deal with 
phenomena rather than processes irritates the un- 
imaginative, iron-headed scientist ; it does n't bother 
the child. He likes to see stars leap into light 
from chaotic night, to hear how the Red Sea piled 
up its mighty waters, and Jericho's massive walls 
68 



THE CHILD AND HIS BIBLE 

crumbled at the sound of the blast of the ram's 
horn. 

The way the Bible writers ignore secondary 
causes and the naive way in which they go back 
to the beginning of things appeals to the child's 
way of thinking. God makes it rain in his world. 
He likes to think of it in that way, and cares very 
little about the machinery He uses. The Bible 
talks in that way. He and the Bible agree. 

The wonder of the Bible stories is obnoxious 
to people who are grown up and dried up. They 
try to pare them down and encumber them with 
explanatory footnotes that make them stir your 
blood no more than an account of a tea party in 
a weekly newspaper. Not so the child. He enjoys 
the thrill. It seems to him just the thing for the 
water to turn into blushing wine in the presence of 
Jesus, for the loaves to multiply like popcorn, and 
Lazarus to walk leisurely out of his tomb. And 
we may yet learn that in this respect the child is 
wiser than the man. 

The tragic element in the Old Testament tales 
does not shock the child. He does not turn pale 
at the sight of blood. He has not yet learned from 
69 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

life's battlefield what a terrible thing it is to bleed 
and to die. Later in life we all learn this lesson 
and we shudder at Judges and Kings, but even 
that shudder is an unconscious testimony to the fact 
that these tales are throbbing with life. The Bible 
is full of tragedy, but so is life, — hence the shudder. 

Do you remember the fascination of the Bible 
stories in childhood's days? You had your Mother 
Goose and your iEsop's Fables and your fairy 
stories, but you knew they were "make believe." 
You felt it, even before they told you so. But 
these matchless accounts of Bible characters and 
life, they were true and they were glorious. You 
felt your mind glow and your soul flame when 
you read them. And even now you feel that the 
critics should hesitate long before assigning to the 
realm of "folk-lore," stories that inspired your child 
soul like that. 

The gospel of the Bible is clear and beautiful 
to the child soul. The child would agree with the 
old lady who said to the agent who was trying to 
sell her a "Harmony of the Gospels," "Such a time 
trying to get four men to agree who never had any 
falling out!" He doesn't know very much about 
70 



THE CHILD AND HIS BIBLE 

names and dates, but in all four matchless biog- 
raphies he sees the Christ of the Syrian lilies and 
the Bethany home walk before him. 

The writer can never forget a chilly November 
Sabbath in his childhood, when for some reason 
he did not go to Church and sat by the dining- 
room stove and let Dr. Luke tell him about Jesus. 
That chamber in his memory smells of roses even to 
this day. Matthew's report of the Sermon on the 
Mount he associates with summer time, a blue sky, 
and a green yard, — an old-fashioned chair under 
the trees — a strange hush of soul as if listening to 
beautiful music. Mark makes him think of the 
district school and morning reading of the Testa- 
ment, when all read in turn. Alas for the day 
that banished that good old custom ! Nature studies 
and daily quotations from Shakespeare and Emer- 
son can never take its place. It was the reading 
like that which gave us Shakespeare and Emerson. 
If we continue to timidly surrender "the wells our 
fathers digged," we will never produce any more 
of that race, and the people will perish because 
there is no vision. 

The Gospel of John and the wonderful dream 
7i 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

of the Revelation and the beautiful glimpses through 
the lattice-work of the face of the Beloved given 
in the Acts and the Epistles, all these surround the 
child soul with an atmosphere and a fragrance that 
is better felt than told. Thank God for the re- 
membrance of childhood spent in a land concerning 
which James Russell Lowell says, "New England 
was full of meeting-houses when I was growing 
up," a land where the Bible is free as the water of 
the untamed brooks and the air sweeping over the 
matchless mountains! 

Have you, gentle reader, somewhere in your 
possession the well-worn Bible of your childhood 
that your mother gave you? It has no notes or 
comments, and its print is rather fine for your 
spectacled eyes to-day, but it was clear enough 
once. And in the last page have you written in 
childish hand, "Finished reading — " and then the 
date? That was a milestone on life's journey. 
You had read the Bible through. There are those 
who tell us now that it is not the way for a child 
to read the Bible. Some there are who say there 
are parts of the Bible unfit for childish eyes to see 
and childish brains to think; but you came through 
72 



THE CHILD AND HIS BIBLE 

the experience with innocence unsoiled and with 
iron in your soul for moral combat with evil. If 
from perusing the unvarnished tales you learned 
some of the mysteries of life concerning which you 
had wondered and which your old-fashioned parents 
had not told you, if some of the dark shadows of 
life were first realized by you then — who shall say 
that is not a good place to find out about them? 
Is it not better to have God's prophets tell you 
some things than the newspaper reporters — some- 
times it may even be better than some of the writers 
on sexual hygiene. Modern teachers say that the 
specialist in pedagogy and psychology should cull 
out and arrange the wonderful riches of the Bible 
according to the requirements of the unfolding child 
mind and soul. They forget that the child will 
arrange them that way himself. When a child is 
turned out into God's out-of-doors world he will 
find the blossoms, see the sights adapted to the child. 
We feel in a similar way about letting the child 
out into the green pastures of Holy Writ. 

It may be in writing these lines we are just 
a little in the mood of the child who said : "I do n't 
want to eat what is nourishing for me. I want to 
73 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

eat what I 'd rather." We certainly are impatient 
with those who think the great things of the Bible 
must all be predigested before given to the child. 
We share something of the feeling of the woman 
who said, when she was told a certain food was 
predigested, "Dear me, who by?" 

We believe in the graded lessons of Bible school 
study. To gain a clear and satisfactory knowledge 
of the Bible and its application to modern life they 
are unsurpassed, but with these we still feel the 
child soul should have the happy privilege of roam- 
ing throughout the whole blessed Book. It is a 
child's Book. He won't need a dictionary nor a 
commentary to enable him to pick up pearls along 
the shores, even if he can't fathom the depths of 
the sea. 

And when he comes to leave the happy valley 
of childhood and goes out into the world, some who 
are reading these pages know from blessed experi- 
ence what happens then. After you had said 
"good-bye" to the old home scenes and faces and 
went sturdily away, your bravery oozed out and 
you found yourself that first night in a strange 
room sitting by a window looking wistfully out on 
74 



THE CHILD AND HIS BIBLE 

the moonlit street, lonesome and homesick. You 
wanted to say "good-night" to your mother and 
could n't, for she was miles away. The very sight 
of the familiar things in your trunk made a lump 
come to your throat. You dreaded to unpack — it 
brought back with a rush the scenes around when 
you packed. Then you reached down into your 
trunk and drew out your well-worn Bible. You 
opened it to familiar chapters, 1 — indeed, it would 
almost open itself there. The words were so well 
known by you that you only needed to read one here 
and there and the rest came trooping from mem- 
ory's chambers, — and the moonlight lost its cold- 
ness and the night wind lost its chill, and you crept 
into the strange bed, warm at the heart as "one 
whom his mother comforted." 



75 



CHAPTER XII 
The Prayers of a Child 

On a young people's meeting held at a Methodist 
camp-meeting a spirit of tenderness and fellowship 
dropped down one day like "showers on the mown 
grass," and the younger folk present were talking 
soberly and eagerly of their spiritual life and vic- 
tory. A boy of twelve or thirteen summers said: 
"I would like to tell you how God answered my 
prayer one day. I was taking an examination in 
Civil Government at school. One of the questions 
called for the answer, 'Supreme Court.' I could 
think of the word 'court,' but not of the word 
'supreme.' So I bowed my head on my desk and 
prayed — and then it came to me, 'Supreme/ and I 
wrote down the correct answer." Of course, it 
would be easy for these people who account for 
everything by their favorite word, "psychology," to 
explain this lad's experience on natural grounds, 
nor would it of necessity be any less divine. Natu- 
ral things are just as divine as supernatural. 
76 



THE PRAYERS OF A CHILD 

It might even be possible to become humorous 
over the lad's faith and theory, and say if God told 
him that word in answer to his prayer it was not 
honest to write it down, — it was cheating. This, 
and more, you might say, my philosophical friend, 
if you had not been at that meeting. If you had 
been there and felt the spell of it, and seen the 
honest-hearted lad's face glow with solemn joy, you 
would not have been very critical. That boy evi- 
dently believed that just as God helped him in 
answer to prayer in his conscientious preparation for 
that examination, so in answer to prayer also He 
helped him when the time came; and the beautiful 
thing about his theory was that it worked. 

Prayer is a human instinct. It is as natural to 
pray as to cry. A workman on a staging was one 
time airing his atheistic views to his fellow-work- 
men when, becoming careless, he slipped from the 
staging and would have plunged to sudden death 
had it not been for the help speedily given him 
by the others. As he was falling and realized in 
one swift moment his condition, almost involun- 
tarily he exclaimed, "O God, help me I" When 
questioned afterwards as to the sudden cure of his 
77 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

infidelity, he said, "Well, if there is n't a God to 
help a fellow when he can't help himself, there 
ought to be." Underneath all his prayerless, faith- 
less years there was still something in him that 
wanted to pray — and at the crisis it showed. It is 
always so. There were no infidels on board when 
the Titanic went down. Therefore, when we con- 
sider the prayer-life of a child we are speaking of 
something as inherent and as normal a part of the 
unfolding mental and spiritual life as the tendency 
to think or love. We begin praying early. Who 
can remember his first prayer? We talked to God 
about as soon as we talked at all — perhaps before. 
Of course, we were taught to pray just as we were 
taught to walk, but there was something about 
us that made us want to do both. Our early pray- 
ing was doubtless selfish and almost pagan. We 
know a clergyman who says he remembers dis- 
tinctly as a small boy telling a lie and then pray- 
ing that his mother might not find it out, for, as 
he told the Lord, he "did n't mean to do it." 
Evidently he asked "amiss," for he remembers dis- 
tinctly that she did find it out, and that right 
speedily — but he did n't stop praying any more than 
78 



THE PRAYERS OF A CHILD 

he stopped walking or crying or singing, and as he 
continued to pray to the Holy Christ he learned 
more the meaning of it, and in answer to prayer 
found "forgiveness of sins and an inheritance 
among those that are sanctified." It takes a whole 
lifetime to learn how to pray well, just as it takes 
a whole season to ripen fruit; but you can have 
sweet and beautiful blossoms in springtime, and we 
believe there is a fragrance around the throne of 
God rising from the blossom-prayers of child souls. 

Certain characteristics of effective prayer espe- 
cially emphasized in the Scriptures are also char- 
acteristics of child life. One of these is faith. Who 
can "believe all things" like the child? 

Another is definiteness. The child prays with 
a definite goal. It is only after he becomes a learned 
clergyman that he opens his prayer with a eulogy 
addressed to the Deity and follows with a list of 
generalities, theological and slightly religious. 

Another characteristic of the child is purity of 
purpose and desire. We mean, of course, after 
he has been purged of his paganism, mentioned a 
moment ago, and really understands what it means 
to pray to the Holy Christ. In a little prayer- 
79 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

meeting one evening a golden-haired girl of seven 
happy years reverently bowed her head and in tones 
that start the tears in the eyes of at least one who 
heard her, as they ring through his memory after 
many years, she said, "Dear Jesus, make me like 
one of Your little lambs." The Good Shepherd 
heard her prayer and one day, not long after that, 
He took her in His arms and carried her to His 
heavenly fold. A big bad boy heard her pray that 
night and he said, "I thought if that little girl 
could pray like that, I could too," and he tried, but 
he could n't. He was n't a lamb ; he was a goat ; 
and save for a few passing moments when he 
thought of her prayer, he wanted to be a goat and 
chose to be. So he never learned to pray, and is 
out in the world to-day a miserable sinner. 

With faith and definiteness and purity, small 
wonder that the fragrance of the children's prayers 
finds its way to the very throne of God! 

We knew a band of children once who united 
to pray. They had a pledge concerning the simple 
duties of clean and wholesome living that they 
signed, and they used to meet after school to pray 
about it. We remember distinctly when one of 
80 



THE PRAYERS OF A CHILD 

the number was overtaken in temptation and broke 
the pledge, how the others all stayed and prayed 
with her, a little girl of twelve. She confessed 
with weeping and sought and found forgiveness. 

It was just a company of children, and some of 
the neighbors said, "They are too young to know 
what they are doing," but still the children prayed, 
and in a very few years the schoolhouse where they 
met was crowded with worshiping people and many 
sought and found Christ there. For some time 
now no school has been held in the little school- 
house. It is a country neighborhood and has felt 
the changes of the years, but still each Sabbath 
afternoon a little company meet there to pray, and 
there is a certain heavenliness to the very at- 
mosphere that is noted by all who come. Like the 
clay that absorbed the fragrance of the rose by 
which it lay, somehow the very building seems 
to be different from ordinary schoolhouses, just as 
the tabernacle was different from ordinary tents. 

And although fewer and fewer assemble at the 
meeting each year, because there are fewer in the 
neighborhood to come, yet it continues to be a way- 
side well of blessing to many souls. Is it because 
« 81 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

the influence of those child-prayers lingers there 
like the Shekinah over Israel's tented camp? Who 
can tell? But it might be well for the discouraged 
pastor eager for a revival, who finds the bankers 
and brokers on his Official Board so rusty and stiff- 
kneed they squeak and creak when he tries to get 
them to pray, to turn his attention to the children. 
If the stones won't cry out, perhaps the hosannahs 
of the children may bring a triumphal entry to his 
Jerusalem. 



82 



CHAPTER XIII 
The Call to Service 

One of the facts that the fiftieth anniversary of 
Gettysburg's terrible battle has revealed is the com- 
parative youth of the majority of the soldiers of 
the Civil War. The Union was preserved by an 
army of boys in their teens. Many of them lied 
about their age to get an opportunity to enlist. 
Some of us confess to have had a temptation to 
do likewise to get an opportunity to enlist for 
Christian service. The natural expression of the 
religion of Jesus Christ is service. The first im- 
pulse of the freshly converted man is a missionary 
impulse. He must find his brother Simon and 
bring him to Jesus. He must ally himself eagerly 
and promptly with those organized agencies that 
exist for the spread of the gospel. He must be 
in them and of them. He must give his testimony 
for Jesus. All this is equally true of the child 
Christian. No more than the adult is he con- 
83 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

tented merely to be good. He must be good for 
something. He must express his spiritual life in 
Christlike service. This impulse, spontaneous and 
genuine, frequently needs direction. 

A lad of ten, fired by the same spirit that 
moved Neal Dow and John B. Gough, with lead- 
pencil and paper worked laboriously preparing 
some temperance tracts. He planned to tack them 
up on bridges and fences. His mother, knowing 
the futility of the special plan of aggressive reform 
outlined by the young prophet, and the unpleasant 
reaction on his own life, endeavored to turn his 
impulse to serve humanity in another direction. 
He responded, largely because he had been trained 
to obey, and remembers well how he felt when 
he assigned the bag of tracts to the fire. His 
mother did not tell him to do that, but, like the 
poetess Mary Wilkins tells about who burned her 
poems and saved the ashes in a sugar bowl, he was 
inclined to be melodramatic. The direction which 
his mother sought to turn his flaming desire for 
service was characteristic of mothers. She sug- 
gested faithfulness in his lessons and chores and 
his efforts to conquer his own fiery temper. In 
84 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

this she was wise; for children who are born ideal- 
ists are prone to separate their religious service 
from the practical drudgery of daily living unless 
reminded by Christian teachers of the apostolic 
advice to do all things heartily unto the Lord. 
What a pity it is that some adult reformers have n't 
mothers to teach them this same lesson! We re- 
call a grocer who conducted a mission in a little 
village and forgot to pay his creditors, a temper- 
ance orator who was cruel to his "bound boy," 
and many personal workers "for souls" who have 
been notoriously neglectful of the plain duties of 
life. So the lad is thankful to-day for the timely 
direction given to his missionary zeal. The present 
duty must be attended to first, then larger fields 
of service would open. And they have. 

But while the child needs to learn the lesson 
of "plain devotedness to duty" and the glory of 
doing common things for Jesus' sake, it is also just 
and right that his Spirit-inspired desire to serve 
should be utilized in the Church of God. The 
disciple who testifies these things recalls vividly an 
experience he had when endeavoring to go to class 
meeting at a city Church one night. In the church 
85 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

building two class meetings were to be held— one 
a young people's class and the other an older peo- 
ple's class, a division of the family of the Church 
which we believe to be exceedingly unfortunate and 
undesirable. With his brother of fourteen, two 
years older than himself, the boy was trying to 
find a place to go to meeting. The young people 
were slow in coming, and the two boys wistfully 
waiting seemed to worry the melancholy old sex- 
ton. Hence he said, and the look and tone are 
preserved on memory's records: "You boys might 
just as well come in here; you won't have anything 
to say anyway." Now, we had come on purpose 
to say something. In the schoolhouse, where we 
worshiped at home, we always had something to 
say. There the stones would have cried out if the 
children had kept still. 

The attitude of that sexton should never be 
the attitude of the Christian Church. A child 
Christian is not different from other Christians. 
He is not to be put in the corner and told to be 
good, to be seen and not heard. He has a testi- 
mony in his soul, a desire to serve Jesus in his 
heart. The Church is his household also, and he 
86 



THE CALL TO SERVICE 

has the right to express his loyalty and his love 
for our common Lord. 

It is no part of this book to treat of methods 
of work among the children. Of the making of 
many books on that subject there is no end. We 
have no word to say against Junior Leagues, and 
children's classes are very desirable in their place, 
just as sometimes a men's meeting or a women's 
meeting is desirable; but against the continual sep- 
aration of the child from the adult in religious 
worship and service we would protest. 

The child needs the adult. He will learn more 
from the prayers and exhortations of the saints 
and prospective saints of the years than from a 
prepared catechism taught him by some nice young 
lady. The joy and the victory, the struggle and 
the tragedy of the Christian life will get into his 
soul better that way than if administered in homoeo- 
pathic doses by specially trained doctors. He should 
feel that he belongs with the others and has a part 
in it and of it. 

Moreover, the adult needs the child. A young 
girl in Wales, with eager face and trembling voice, 
arose in a meeting and said, "I do love the Lord 
87 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

Jesus with all my heart," and the Welsh revival 
wafted the voice of singing over land and ocean. 
The Church of Christ as never before in its 
history is hearing the call to social service. We 
are realizing that the Church exists not merely to 
build up its own borders and battlements, but to 
save the community. Jesus taught this lesson "rest- 
less centuries ago," but we have sometimes been 
slow to learn it. The child soul also hears this 
call. A little boy looking at the famous picture 
we have all seen of the little girl crossing the 
bridge with the broken rail and the guardian angel 
attending her, said wonderingly, "Why do n't the 
angel mend the rail?" The work of mending the 
rail appeals to children. The movements for 
cleaner cities, for mercy and kindness and the 
prevention of evil everywhere will find eager help- 
ers in the children. All they need is, like the man 
from Missouri, "to be shown." 



CHAPTER XIV 
The Call to Sainthood 

The child believes in being perfect. It is grown-up 
people who learn the fine art of lowering their 
ideals to correspond to their attainments. 

The lowering of an ideal is always pathetic — • 
the loss of an ideal is tragic. When Edgar Allan 
Poe was twenty he wrote: 

I stand amid the roar 
Of a surf-tormented shore, 
And I hold within my hand 
Grains of the golden sand 
How few ! Yet how they creep 
Through my fingers to the deep. 
While I weep, while I weep! 
O God, can I not save 
One from the pitiless wave? 
Is all that we see or seem 
But a dream within a dream? 

These lines might have been his epitaph, for they 
were his biography. He lost all his golden ideals 
and died moaning in half-consciousness, "Lord, help 
my poor soul!" When a man loses his ideals — 
89 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

lets them all slip through his fingers, no matter 
whether his picture hangs in the hall of fame or not, 
"the shadow on his pathway shall be lifted never- 
more." 

Our ideals are born with us, or at least come 
early. They are the first-fruits of prevenient grace. 
That is why there is truth in Wordsworth's state- 
ment that "trailing clouds of glory do we come 
from God, who is our Home." We have already 
considered the idealist philosophy of childhood. 
This same divinely-inspired mental tendency makes 
the child an idealist in Christian experience. The 
notion clings to him that it must be possible to be 
perfectly good. His mother has expected it of 
him ever since he can remember — it must be God 
expects it, too, and what God expects He must 
furnish grace to accomplish. He never mistrusted 
until the theologians told him that a Christian 
must continue to live in sin. His idea of a Chris- 
tian is that given by the little girl to her Sunday 
school teacher, "To be a Christian means to keep 
away from sin." 

This is the only chapter in which we touch 
the subject of religious pedagogy. We confess to 
90 



THE CALL TO SAINTHOOD 

practically no specific experience therein: but from 
our own experience as a child we venture a few 
suggestions. It is of the first importance that the 
child hold this ideal. It is better to die half way 
up the Alps carrying the banner "Excelsior" than 
to live in contentment in the lowlands. Long- 
fellow said, regarding the youth who died that 
way: 

There in the twilight cold and gray 
Lifeless but beautiful he lay, 
And from the sky serene and far 
A voice fell like a falling star, 
"Excelsior !" 

There is something splendidly heroic about 
Tennyson's Merlin, who spent his lifetime follow- 
ing the gleam and who died pointing it to others: 

And can no longer but die rejoicing, 
For through the magic of Him the Mighty, 
Who taught me in childhood, 
There on the border of boundless Ocean 
And all but in heaven, hovers the gleam. 
O young mariner, down to the haven 
Call your companions, launch your vessel 
And crowd your canvas, And ere it vanishes 
Over the margin, After it, Follow it, Follow 
the gleam. 

91 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

If a child is to become an artist, we wish him 
to strive for the perfect picture; if he is to become 
a musician, to work for the perfect song. We heard 
of a mother who, in reply to her boy's statement 
that he was to become a garbage man, wisely talked 
to him of how to do the work of a garbage man 
perfectly, so that he might be a blessing to the com- 
munity. Some one, in a poem called "The Artist," 
has put this same ideal into words, beautiful and 
inspiring : 

His was a lowly task: 

Only toiled at digging ditches 
All the livelong day; 

Yet he worked with joy, 
And at the end of labor he could say, 

"There is a ditch, that is a ditch 
Honest as I am, and straight and true — 

No man can dig it better; 
I 'd be glad to have Almighty God 

Look it through." 

Hence it is the normal and natural, as well as the 
Scriptural expectation that the child should hold 
his ideal of a perfect Christian life and say with 
Charles Wesley : 



92 



THE CALL TO SAINTHOOD 

What! never speak an impure word, 

Or harsh or evil or unkind? 
How shall I, most gracious Lord, 

This mark of true perfection find? 

We have sometimes thought that half the grace 
and winsomeness of the late Benjamin M. Adams, 
whose faithful and fruitful ministry inspired the 
hymn, "One more day's work for Jesus," was that 
he never lowered his ideal. He never talked much 
about "having attained;" he called himself "just a 
seeker," confessed to many sins and failures, but 
kept his faith in the possibility of a life of perfect 
victory and, in the eyes of every one but himself, 
practiced it. Therefore, let the child keep his ideal. 
Hang a millstone around the theological stiff neck 
of the man who would steal it from one of those 
little ones and cast him into the sea of oblivion. 

In the second place, and we are still speaking 
pedagogically, let us magnify the possibilities of 
the grace of God in the soul of a child. If it is 
effective anywhere, it certainly has its best chance 
to be there. There are ripened fruits of grace 
which are the product of the years. There are 
lessons in Christlike living that time and experi- 
93 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

ence and pain alone can teach. It takes a whole 
lifetime to grow a Christlike character. But per- 
fect blossoms are a good preparation for sound 
fruit, and it is certainly both philosophical and 
Scriptural to expect the child to be able to secure 
enough of the grace of God to obtain complete 
victory over the sins of childhood. We do not need 
to be dogmatic or controversial as to theory or 
method, but simply repeat again the words of Mary 
Willard, "God commands me to love Him with all 
my heart, and I think I can do it, if I am helped." 
It was the beloved John who said, "My little chil- 
dren, these things write I unto you that ye sin not." 
These words are written not that Elder Sancti- 
monious and Sister Rigid may expect every child 
who "names the name of Jesus" to be faultless as 
well as blameless. These critical individuals had 
better change their residence from their present 
glass house before they throw many stones. We 
write these words that none may place a hindrance 
or barrier in the way of the child as he seeks by 
the grace of God to follow his own ideal, engraven 
on his mind by the Word of God and on his heart 
by the Spirit Divine. 

94 



THE CALL TO SAINTHOOD 

There have been many foolish things written 
on the subject of Christian perfection. As soon as 
some men get any sort of a blessing from heaven 
they take to running camp-meetings and writing 
books. We do not purpose to add anything to 
what has already been written, but simply say this, 
that whatever heights and depths and fullness of 
the saving grace of God there are — and there we 
are prone to underestimate rather than overesti- 
mate — they are all for the child soul. Moreover, 
the accident insurance that goes with all our strug- 
gle for perfection is his also. "If any child sin we 
have an Advocate with the Father, even Jesus 
Christ the Righteous, and He is the Propitiation for 
our sins, and not for ours only but for the sins of 
the whole world." 



95 



CHAPTER XV 

The Child's Dress 

So real was the sense of things spiritual in the 
early home of Frances E. Willard that when she 
was afflicted with one of the physical ills common 
to childhood she was accustomed to say, "My dress 
aches." The physical dress of the soul of a child 
has a very pronounced influence on that child's life. 
We can not understand completely his soul until 
we know some things about his body. The child 
is aware of his body before he is aware of his soul. 
His first experiences are physical. This is no argu- 
ment against the reality of his spiritual life; for at 
the very beginning of his career he is equally ig- 
norant of the existence of his body. That he be- 
comes aware of his body is an argument for the 
existence of his soul, for he who becomes thus aware 
is the soul we are talking about. 

The relation of the soul to the body is an inter- 
esting study. That the soul has a pronounced effect 
on the body is illustrated by such simple things 
as the blush of shame, the blanched face of fear, 
96 



THE CHILD'S DRESS 

the flashing eyes of anger, and the quick heart-beat 
of mighty emotion. To attempt, however, to pro- 
vide for physical ills and wants wholly by spiritual 
cures and supplies, whatever it may be in theory, 
in practical life is as absurd as the story of the 
shipwrecked sailor who claimed that he existed for 
weeks by thinking of the folks at home until a 
lump came in his throat and then swallowing the 
lump. 

The consideration of effect of the body on the 
soul bears more directly on the subject of this 
chapter and book. It is doubtless a good thing for 
the soul to have a body, otherwise we would not 
have been thus clothed. There are probably lessons 
in life's eternal school that we can best learn in 
this material world by dwelling in a material body. 
It may be because the 

Mark of rank in nature is 

Capacity for pain, 
And the sadness of the singer 

Lends the sweetness to the strain. 

Byron Palmer, sitting in his invalid's chair, turn- 
ing to stone, holding the pen with stiffening fingers 
that wrote "God's White Throne," doubtless grew 
97 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

a bigger soul because of the terrible physical ex- 
perience that was his. 

Who has not been thrilled as he has read of 
Robert Louis Stevenson's heroic battle with disease 
and pain, through black, weary nights still keeping 
the laughter in his soul and the stars in his sky, and 
when at last he was baffled, writing these sublime 
words : 

Under the wide and starry sky 
Dig the grave and let me die; 
Gladly did I live and gladly die, 
And I laid me down with a will 
This be the verse you grave for me: 
"Here he lies where he longed to be, 
Hence is the sailor home from the sea 
And the hunter home from the hill"? 

The soul that penned those words was doubt- 
less more royal from its association with a body 
racked with pain. 

Nor is this all; there are doubtless experiences 
of joy and peace that come to the soul because it 
is clothed upon with this mortal clay. If the taste 
of wild strawberries and the whiff from wild roses 
are physical experiences, our souls are richer because 
of them. There is a physical joy which makes 
"young lambs bound as to tabor's sound while the 
98 



THE CHILD'S DRESS 

birds then sing a joyous song" which must affect 
our souls. 

On the other hand, the burden of this physical 
body which, as the apostle says, "perishes daily," 
has brought discords to many a hymn of praise, 
interfered with the success of many a splendidly 
conceived plan for Christian service, and brought 
the lines of care and distress to many an otherwise 
radiant and transfigured face. 

The conclusion is, therefore, that we are better 
souls because of our physical experiences, but we 
do not seem to be so good. Our life of sainthood 
and service is not as satisfactory to ourselves or 
others because in this body "we groan, being 
burdened." This may be questioned when one 
thinks of the splendid examples of heroic suffer- 
ing we have mentioned, but we think if the question 
had been submitted to them and their most intimate 
associates they would have expressed the same con- 
viction. 

All this applies in a very special way to child- 
hood, because, as already stated, the child is in- 
tensely physical. A pastor calling upon a mother 
whose little girl had recently given her life to the 
99 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

Christ, asked how Mary was getting along. She 
replied: "I do not think Mary understood what 
she was doing. She wanted to go sliding this morn- 
ing just as usual." It does not apply especially to 
the point we are endeavoring to illustrate, but it 
might be interesting to know that the pastor con- 
fessed to the writer, "There was a fine crust that 
morning, and I had been sliding myself ;" but think 
of Mary with childhood's blood running swift and 
warm and childhood's body quiveringly eager to go 
bouncing down the frosty hill! 

An old lady, who was thrice widowed and crip- 
pled with rheumatism, arose in meeting and said in 
effect that she knew she was converted because the 
Lord had taken all the love of the dance out of 
her heart. That He had done so is doubtless true, 
but the method He used may have been by advanc- 
ing years and her rheumatism. Her unfortunate 
matrimonial experiences may have also had its ef- 
fect. We can not be surprised if a child, young and 
strong of limb and blithe of heart, does not spon- 
taneously take her view of the situation, even if his 
soul is just as eager for whatsoever things are 
lovely and true. 

ioo 



THE CHILD'S DRESS 

Wc have felt that when official members and 
deacons in the stress of modern life, with strained 
nerves and weary heads, are not as patient and 
calm at some late Church meeting as their profes- 
sion and position would seem to warrant, due al- 
lowance should be made for their physical condi- 
tion. If this be true — and who can doubt it? — it 
is also true that if a troop of merry children, who 
love the Lord and love His cause, do not seem to 
have the "sacred awe that is not fear" on all occa- 
sions when it is the proper attitude of mind, we 
should not hastily conclude that they are aliens from 
the commonwealth of Israel. 

The body of a child: how little after all we 
know about it! It has taken a long line of genera- 
tions to make it just what it is. The failures of 
ancestors long dead are recorded in it. The iniqui- 
ties of the fathers are visited upon it. The poten- 
tialities of fatherhood and motherhood exist within 
it and in some mysterious way will grow with the 
expanding years. Its influence on the soul of the 
child is so subtle as to be hardly realized. So many 
of the experiences of childhood and youth that seem 
to be spiritual or infernal are really caused by blood 
IOI 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

corpuscles or nerve tissue. With this body, or, as 
we are wont to say, in this body, the soul of the 
child must live for threescore years and ten, more 
or less. Happy the child who learns early two 
things. The first of these is to keep his body pure. 
As the temple of his spirit and, as the apostle puts 
it, as the temple of the Holy Ghost, it should be 
kept in good repair. The second is to keep his body 
under. The apostle implies that he sometimes had 
to fight to do it. It is worth fighting for. The 
supremacy of the soul is worth a struggle. This 
supremacy can best be won not by books of hygiene, 
but by things that feed the soul. 

These are days when there is much talk about 
telling the child the vital facts of physical exist- 
ence. There can be no objection to this — indeed, 
it is very desirable — provided by vital facts we mean 
the facts that pure men and women must know. 
It can not be necessary to take a child through the 
slime so he will know enough to keep out of it. 
The old pilot showed sense when one asked him 
if he knew where all the rocks in the harbor were. 
He replied, "No, but I know where they ain't." 
The writer thanks God there are some things he 
1 02 



THE CHILD'S DRESS 

does not know. The bloom of innocence is still 
worth keeping. A knowledge of the vital facts 
of life will not necessarily give the child soul- 
supremacy. This must be done by growing a vig- 
orous soul. To be thinking of things spiritual and 
eternal during the child years so that the habit is 
formed and continued during the years of youth, 
when many experiment in things physical and car- 
nal, is a splendid guarantee of pure manhood and 
womanhood. 

The atmosphere of the Willard home, that the 
soul is the important thing, the body but a dress, 
is a priceless heritage, and probably had much to 
do in giving us America's uncrowned queen, whose 
marble statue worthily represents her State in our 
National Capitol and whose gracious influence has 
blessed many homes. 

The advice of an old-fashioned book is unsur- 
passed for child and youth and man: "Whatso- 
ever things are pure, whatsoever things are true, 
whatsoever things are lovely and of good report, — 
if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, 
think on these things." 



103 



CHAPTER XVI 
The Child's Food 

Sir Francis Bacon said, "Some books are to be 
tasted, others to be swallowed, some few to be 
chewed and digested." This quotation will per- 
haps indicate the meaning of the title of this chap- 
ter. 

One of the first books the child reads is the book 
of nature — and a wonderful book it is. It was the 
privilege of the writer to revisit not long since the 
little wayside cottage where he first remembers to 
have pored over this book. The kindly face of his 
grandmother that used to greet him was absent; he 
visited her grave that afternoon. A stranger met 
him at the door; but the old Williams apple tree 
still spread its kindly shade by the kitchen windows ; 
the sturdy oak by the end of the house looked just 
the same, although the happy-hearted boy who used 
to play beneath its majestic branches was gone. 
Half whimsically he wondered if it knew the home- 
104 



THE CHILD'S FOOD 

sick pilgrim gazing at it through his tears was that 
same boy. 

In the hazel bushes across the road the locusts 
plajied their mandolins and flutes just as they did 
a quarter of a century ago. A red squirrel slipped 
slyly and shyly across the road. The wayside blos- 
soms were as sweet, the afternoon sunlight was as 
kind. He recalled gratefully the words of Whit- 
tier: 

The years no charm from nature take: 

As clear her voices call, 
As fresh her mornings break, 

As calm her evenings fall. 

What wonderful lessons he used to learn from 
nature's book! All her pages were illustrated — il- 
lustrated with pictures of dewy mornings when the 
little creatures that dwell between the blades of 
grass had spread their fairy umbrellas, when the 
sun was so bright that, as the boy looked at it with 
the unblinking carelessness of childhood, great disks 
of purple and red and yellow and green seem to 
roll from it down over the sky and tumble into the 
tree-tops. (He would not dare to look at it now 
without smoked glasses. It was probably a bad 
105 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

thing for his eyes then, but he is glad he did n't 
know it until afterwards.) 

The pages of this book were illustrated also 
with crimson sunsets that touched with glory the 
ragged clouds peering up over the horizon, and the 
boy, wondering, said to himself, "Do they come up 
every night, and do they make the dark?" 

Then, there were pages of rain upon the roof — 
pattering, pattering, pattering — so near his little bed 
that if it were not for the shingled roof between 
he could reach out and get a whole handful of 
crystal drops! 

This is a good world for a child to be born 
in. Nature is a good book for him to learn his 
first lessons in. He does n't realize how much those 
sights and sounds of God's out-of-doors have en- 
tered into his child soul until in later years he finds 
when he recalls them they are all tangled up with 
the life of his spirit — they have entered into the 
very tissue of his soul. The brook singing out back 
of the house did n't merely please his ear — it 
splashed into his heart. 

Because the child reads so eagerly the book of 
nature he can not be an atheist. He may be a 
1 06 



THE CHILD'S FOOD 

pagan, but not an infidel — for nature is a religious 
book. It is people who have moved in-doors and 
shut down the windows and pulled down the cur- 
tains who are atheists. The child is out-of-doors 
with God and he believes, for the lovely words 
T. E. Brown applies to his own are equally true 
of nature's garden : 

A garden is a lovesome thing 
God wot: 
Rose plot, 

Fringed pool, 
Ferned grot; 

The veriest school 

Of peace, and yet the fool 
Contends that God is not. 
Not God? In gardens? 

When the eve is cool? 
Nay, but I have a sign 
'T is very sure God walks in mine. 

The second book the child reads might almost 
be called by the title Harriet Beecher Stowe gives 
to one of her charming novels, "We and Our 
Neighbors." The pages are covered with photo- 
graphs. The first page has one face — and happy 
is the child who gets the first glimpse of heaven 
in his mother's eyes! Other faces there are — and 
107 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

as you think of them even now at night they are 
more interesting than the most fascinating arti- 
ficial moving pictures. 

When the eccentric Father Taylor was dying, 
one whispered to him, "You are going to see the 
angels soon." Quick as a flash the old man replied, 
"Folks are better than angels." 

Do you remember the folks of your childhood? 

It may be you had an elder sister that bossed 
you and told you to "go away and not bother her," 
but one night when your parents were away and 
she was left to be mater familias and you tried to 
say your prayers, all of you children were so full 
of frolic and laughter you could n't say them — you 
got half way through "Our Father who art in 
heaven," and then dissolved into giggles over noth- 
ing. Your sister was in it, too, but after she had 
tried several times, she said, "Wait a minute," and 
then, very reverently, in a little hushed voice, she 
asked God to help you all say your prayers — and 
somehow the frolic died away and a great sense 
of quietness came stealing in with the evening 
breeze, and you could pray with steady, thoughtful 
voice after that: and your childhood's soul drank 
it all in. 108 



THE CHILD'S FOOD 

There was a rough man who "tended the boiler" 
in the neighboring machine shop. At least you 
thought he was rough, for he chased away the 
mischievous boys who gathered around^— and one 
day you were running away with them and he 
called you back and gave you a whistle and talked 
to you and told you to come again — and you used 
to go to see him and you and he were chums after 
that — and the lesson your soul learned was some- 
thing like that expressed in these lines by James 
Whitcomb Riley: 

There 's a spot for good to bloom in 
Every heart of man or woman, 
And however wild or human, 

Or however burned with gall, 
The darkest heart to doubt it 
Has something good about it 

After all. 

The little girl next door died one day. And 
you sat by your front door and heard the minister's 
rich, sympathetic voice reading the solemn words. 
For the first time in your life you saw a home 
with its most bitter sorrow — and a chord of sym- 
pathy you did n't know existed began to vibrate in 
109 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

your soul. It has vibrated so often since that it 
has worn a place all around it that aches all the 
time, but it came first that day. 

For, after all, this is the lesson the child learns 
from the book of human nature — the picture book, 
"We and Our Neighbors." He learns to be a 
humanitarian. From the book of nature he learns 
that a "side of his nature is open toward the 
Infinite." From this book of folks he learns that 
nothing that is human is foreign to him. Those 
are big lessons. It takes a whole lifetime to learn 
them well. Therefore, it is well that we start in 
childhood. 

We have said that the child in God's out-of- 
doors can not be an atheist. It is also true that 
the child in God's world of folks can not be a 
recluse. A man will have to forget his childhood 
lessons if he ever becomes a sordid hermit or a pillar 
saint. It is the natural and normal thing for the 
child learning the lessons God has given a child to 
learn, with the soul God has given to learn them, 
"to dwell in a house by the side of the road and 
be a friend to man." 



no 



CHAPTER XVII 

More Food 

Oliver Twist became immortal by asking "for 
more." However, he did not do an unusual thing. 
It is the child that does not ask for more who is 
unique. And for that matter, in this particular 
adults are but children a few years older. 

The child's glimpses of nature — flat on his back 
perhaps, looking up through the leafy boughs of a 
tree at the wonder of the cloud-swept blue — make 
him long for more. 

The child's glimpses of humanity — sitting in 
the boiler-room listening timidly to the tales of the 
smutty-faced engineer — make him long for more. 

Hence the early appeal of literature to childish 
mind and soul. And in this chapter we talk of 
books — not fanciful books, but literal flesh and 
blood, paper and ink, leather and gold books. 

We do not propose, however, to say what the 
child ought to read, neither do we attempt to de- 
scribe the books he ought not to read. We re- 
member a clever merchant who covered his show- 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

windows all over save two little peek-holes and put 
over them the sign, "Do not look in here." And 
we remember that it accomplished just what the 
merchant had foreseen. 

Our purpose is to speak of some books that feed 
the child soul. In a previous chapter we have 
spoken of the Bible. When Sir Walter Scott was 
dying he exclaimed, "Bring me the Book." "What 
book?" they asked, for he had a large library and 
was himself the creator of books. "Bring me the 
Book," he replied, "there is only one Book." And 
that is as true for the living child as the dying 
sage. There is no book compares with the Bible 
in its capacity to feed the soul. That must always 
be first. 

A puritanical minister one time said he would 
not read anything unless it was perfectly true. 
We have wondered what he could read. The well- 
worn and always loved "Pilgrim's Progress" would 
have to go. "Robinson Crusoe" could never de- 
scribe to us his desert island and good man Friday. 
The average school history would have to be badly 
mutilated, for the higher critics have been as merci- 
less with the good old stories of Peter Parley as 

112 



MORE FOOD 

they have been with Jonah and Job. How he 
would have to cut up his Bible! The priceless 
parables of Jesus and the matchless visions of the 
Revelation were hardly true in the cold, gray sense 
this preacher meant. And finally, a daily news- 
paper could never darken his doors. About all he 
could read would be the multiplication table! 

As a matter of fact, what we call fiction is often 
more nearly true than what we call history; what 
we call poetry is more real than what we call fact. 
For fiction, real fiction, dripping with life, gives 
us the soul of history — the bare and often imper- 
fect narrative of events gives us the dried-up body. 
You can learn more of Hebrew history from the 
Psalms than from the Chronicles! "The Battle- 
Hymn of the Republic" gives you a better vision 
of American history than the Congressional Record. 

It may seem heresy to say it, but a child had 
better be ignorant of the multiplication table than 
to be without an imagination. However, there is 
no occasion for anxiety, for Almighty God has 
equipped the average child with a fairly vigorous 
imagination and left parents and schoolma'ams to 
pound in the multiplicaiton table! 
8 113 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

We do believe that the average child is not as 
silly as his average instructor. We think even a 
small child would just as soon hear his mother sing 
"Holy angels guard thy bed" as some popular ditty 
ground out by the recent phonograph. We have a 
very vivid remembrance of how our soul was nause- 
ated by the crude fairy stories some childless rela- 
tives presented to us, and how it was fired by some 
of the splendid things in literature that came our 
way early. The author of this book will never 
cease to thank God that his tired father used to 
read the poems of John Greenleaf Whittier to him 
on Sunday afternoons. He does n't remember very 
much about them, but the spirit and the music 
sunk into his soul. There was another poem of a 
terrible battle and a dying man calling for water 
that lingers in memory to this day. The author 
and lines are long since forgotten — but the poem 
was full of soul-thrilling tragedy and life. 

Every Methodist Sunday school worker should 
be grateful for the new Sunday School Hymnal 
because of the fine type of poetry it has introduced 
to our Sunday schools. We have attended Christ- 
mas celebrations where little children sang things 
114 



MORE FOOD 

about "St. Nick" that were crude in literary style 
and irreverent in spirit. How refreshing now to 
hear: 

There's a song in the air, 

There 's a star in the sky, 
There 's a mother's deep prayer 

And a baby's low cry; 
And the star rains the fire 

While the beautiful sing, 
For the manger of Bethlehem 

Cradles a King! 

We would not dare say anything against 
Mother Goose. She seems to be as necessary to 
some homes as paregoric. But we would respect- 
fully call attention to such books of childish verse 
as those of Robert Louis Stevenson and Eugene 
Field. They both had child souls and a literary 
taste that is exquisite. But before we become peda- 
gogical, we hasten to say that our contention is 
simply that the child soul be given good poetry to 
feed on. It will be richer and sweeter forever be- 
cause of it. 

It is customary to poke fun at the old-time 
Sunday school library. Indeed, the modern Car- 
negie affairs have about driven it out of business — 
i'5 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

but whatever may have been its defects, it had one 
thing that more than offset them all. Have you 
ever seen a flower garden full of awkward, homely 
flowers — with one little pansy blossom so sweet you 
forgot all the rest? Whatever the literary critics 
may say, the fresh, pure, and beautiful stories of 
Mrs. Alden have been a literal message of light and 
power to many a child soul. She knows how to 
translate the message of the Christ into the terms 
of a boy's and girl's life so that it will appeal to 
their chivalry and their enthusiasm. Her saints 
are full of warm-red blood. Her ideals are sane. 
Her own beautiful spirit sheds its fragrance 
through all her books, — they are worth while. 

"Pilgrim's Progress" is immortal. Unimagina- 
tive people have tried to rule it out of late. Social 
service experts say Christian ought not to have 
started on his pilgrimage and left his family in 
the city of Destruction. They strongly hint that 
he ought to have stayed at home, got elected on a 
sanitary commission and tried to improve the con- 
ditions of his native burg. Thus they miss en- 
tirely the point of the tale. The city of Destruc- 
tion, of course, signifies a life of sin, from which 
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MORE FOOD 

every man should get out, whether his wife goes 
with him or not. The child sees this. He has 
no fads to blind him. He knows what the city of 
Destruction of his life is, and applies the imaginary 
pilgrimage to his own career. He knows what 
Apollyon he ought to kill, and Bunyan's dream puts 
iron in his soul for the conflict. Perhaps we should 
hardly call it a food — it is more like a tonic for 
the soul. And yet it is not bitter to take. "Chil- 
dren cry for it." 

An early acquaintance with the best of Amer- 
ican literature is a blessing to be desired— good for 
the mind and soul. And very fortunately the 
heroes of our golden age were nearly all lovers 
of children and remembered them with voice and 
pen. Hawthorne's tales, chaste and beautiful, are 
so simple, a child can not only understand their 
meaning, but also appreciate their beauty. Long- 
fellow's verses, exquisite as a garden of blush roses, 
have no thorns to prick childish fingers. Even 
Bryant is a children's poet at times and his "little 
people of the snow" and Sella are charming fairy 
stories. Whittier was a bachelor, but never forgot 
his own childhood, and his winsome simplicity and 
117 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

directness make him a favorite with the little folks. 

The writer counts it one of the blessings of his 
life that during his later child years, perhaps when 
he was thirteen or fourteen, he came under the 
spell of the genius of Harriet Beecher Stowe. That 
meant the opening of a new world before him and 
a new heaven above him. He re-reads "Oldtown 
Folks" each year just as he visits again his old home, 
and he always closes its covers with quickened mind, 
clearer vision, and tender feelings in his breast. 
Mr. Lincoln called Mrs. Stowe "the little woman 
who caused this big war;" but that was perhaps 
the least of the things she did with her magic pen. 
We know a learned preacher, full of science and 
philosophy, who surprised us by saying that during 
the days of his college skepticism the thing that 
brought him to a life of faith and victory was 
reading Mrs. Stowe's "My Wife and I." Many 
others owe her a similar debt. And the child soul 
will be richer if it knows her early. 

The healthy child relishes history and biography. 
Indeed, he astonishes many an adult who has intel- 
lectual dyspepsia and partakes daintily of highly 
flavored fiction by the hearty eagerness with which 
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MORE FOOD 

he can chew and digest the solid life-stories of men 
and women who have lived and dared. God made 
him that way so he would grow. 

One of the finest touches in Whittier's "Snow- 
bound" is the account of the arrival of the weekly 
newspaper. After a week shut in from the world 
by the storm : 

At last the floundering carrier bore 
The village paper to our door; 
Lo! broadening outward as we read 
To warmer zones the horizon spread; 
In panoramic length unrolled 
We saw the marvels that it told; 
We felt the stir of hall and street, 
The pulse of life that round us beat; 
The chill embargo of the snow 
Was melted in the genial glow. 
Wide swung again our ice-locked door, 
And all the world was ours once more. 

In these days when a new edition of some flaring 
daily is cried on the streets every few hours, the 
simple charm of scenes like that has passed away 
with the good old days. But happy the child one 
day of whose week is a red-letter day because his 
mind and soul are fed by some periodical that is 
fresh and wholesome. You can't feed your mind 
119 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

and soul on daily papers. They are good for men 
who want to find out about the stock market and 
the weather, or women who are interested in bar- 
gains; but a child's growing mind will starve on 
such intellectual sawdust. A home with only secu- 
lar dailies is as bare of soul food as old Mother 
Hubbard's cupboard. But, thank God ! the Youth's 
Companion and its stalwart Methodist brother, The 
Classmate, are still with us; and, although it is hard 
to convince some people of the fact, the average 
Church paper is as full of wholesome food as a 
New England Thanksgiving dinner. It is still 
true that the clearest brains and most kingly souls 
are in the Church of God. What they say with 
voice and pen is good for man and child. 

We have not attempted, in this chapter, a cata- 
logue of books to be read by various ages and types 
of children. We have simply tried to hint that the 
child soul should be fed with sincere milk of the 
Word, "honey from the rock," and the "finest of 
the wheat." 



120 



CHAPTER XVIII 

The Child's Sabbath 

Isaac Watts thought of heaven as a land "where 
congregations ne'er break up and Sabbaths never 
end." Many have seen a grim humor in this de- 
scription and have sympathized with the little girl 
who told her mother she wanted to go to the other 
place, where there was "more going on." 

The old-time Sabbath was not adapted to the 
active limbs and ready laugh and eager mind of 
untamed childhood. We do not wonder that its 
hours seemed to go with leaden feet and that, after 
two long services and the grave, silent hours at 
home, the child could hardly feel like David, that 
"a day in Thy courts is better than a thousand." 

But as we have seen the modern Sabbath with 
the crowded trains and trolleys — in which little 
children are dragged around in a crowd of pleasure- 
seekers all day and come home at night with hot, 
sticky faces down which tears of weariness trickle 
unrestrained, we have wondered if after all it is 
not the child of to-day that needs our pity. With 

121 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

all its defects, the old-time Sabbath did two things — 
it gave the child soul time to think "long, long 
thoughts," and it put the child's body in such con- 
dition that he came to Monday rested and "fresh 
as a daisy." This the modern Sabbath does not 
do. Watch the dusty crowd returning from the 
excursion train and you will not see much of Sab- 
bath peace or satisfaction. A Sabbath spent next 
to the heart of nature has much in its favor, but 
a Sabbath spent in a crowd of people going rest- 
lessly from ice-cream tables to moving picture 
shows and band concerts all day is hardly close to 
the heart of nature, even if there is an unnoticed 
ocean in the distance. 

The child's soul needs a Sabbath, probably not 
the rigid Sabbath of the Puritans, but it needs a 
Sabbath ! The Sabbath was made for man because 
he needed it. The child needs it, too. He needs 
the rest. It 's hard work playing all the week. 
If you do n't believe it, try it yourself awhile, you 
grown-up reader. That little boy of yours can tire 
you out in a couple of hours so that you exclaim 
in self -protection, "Run to your mother awhile 
now." The child needs a time when his week- 



THE CHILD'S SABBATH 

day toys — most of them^— are put away and he can 
rest. As the school years draw on he needs to put 
his school-books away, too. Every once in a while 
in grammar or high school the question is debated, 
"Is it right to study on Sunday?" That is not 
the best way to put it. It is as if one were to 
debate the question, "Is it right to put your hand 
on a hot stove" or "Is it right to ignore the law 
of gravitation?" There is a moral side, of course, 
to both of these questions, but that is hardly the most 
prominent one. When God made a child's brain, 
He made it to do business in a world where one 
day in seven was a day of rest in worship. There- 
fore, it is not guaranteed to run successfully in any 
other kind of a world. 

But, most of all, for his spiritual welfare does 
the child need the Sabbath. There is a psycho- 
logical atmosphere about Sunday — when the mill 
whistle is silent, and the stores are closed, their cur- 
tains down; when work on the farm ceases; when 
the church bell peals out, and so many people 
everywhere are thinking of God and eternity — that 
the sensitive soul of the child is as responsive to 
as the wilting field of corn to a summer shower. 
123 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

We shall never forget the Sabbaths in the coun- 
try home of our childhood. We never dreaded 
them; they had an interest all their own. A rest- 
ful quiet seemed to mantle all nature. The very 
cattle grazing in the pasture seemed to know it was 
Sunday and take a quiet satisfaction in it. The 
huge oxen knew it because that day they were 
turned out with the other stock. No loads to haul 
to-day. Almighty God had them in mind and men- 
tioned them by name when He told Moses to write 
down the fourth commandment. Then, through 
the hush sounded musical in the distance the church 
bell. The quiet ride to church, the service, and 
the ride home again; then a peaceful afternoon, 
either in the house or under the shade of the an- 
cient maple tree in the pasture, or under the "apple 
bloom of May" in the orchard, with a bundle of 
good reading matter, the Church paper, and one's 
own Bible (the writer was trying to beat his brother 
in reading it through and went galloping through 
Leviticus and Numbers). Then "sunset and even- 
ing star," and early to bed — rested in body, mind, 
and soul. 

That our childhood experience was not the ex- 
124 



THE CHILD'S SABBATH 

ception we have found from our study of biog- 
raphy — wherever the child soul has been given a 
true Sabbath, the fragrance of it has been wafted 
down the devest years. Frances E. Willard wrote: 
"O, sacred Sabbaths of our childhood! O early 
mornings in the spring, when we ran together 
through the dewy grass, or laid our ears to the 
bosom of the earth to hear her vibrant breathing 
and to thrill at her pulsing heart! O birds that 
sang for me, and flowers that bloomed for me! O 
father-love and mother-love that held me!" She 
thus associates her childhood Sabbaths with the most 
beautiful things of her beautiful past! Many there 
are who read those lines who would like to "speak 
in meeting" on this same subject. We are not plead- 
ing for blue laws or a Sabbath day of idle gloom ; 
but when we see the pathetic quest for pleasure, 
the indignant protest against any restriction upon 
the multiplying schemes of amusement on the Sab- 
bath, we feel, like lifting up our voice in behalf of 
the child and saying, Give child soul a Sabbath! 



125 



CHAPTER XIX 
The Other Child 

There has to be the other child, for two reasons. 
One is to account for all the naughty things in your 
child, dear parents. He learns them from the bad 
little boy across the way. 

The more vital reason is that old-fashioned truth 
that "It is not good for man to be alone." We 
need each other. There are, of course, exceptions, 
but generally speaking a hermit can not become a 
saint. Occasionally there are unavoidable circum- 
stances which compel one to move from the house 
beside the road; sometimes an Emily Dickenson 
seems especially called to the quiet places of life, 
but usually the example of the ministering Christ 
is the only safe one to follow. 

The child is naturally a social being. There 
is a warm feeling in his heart for his fellows. God 
made him so. It is just as much a part of his 
equipment for life as his eyes with which to see and 
his ears with which to hear. 

126 



THE OTHER CHILD 

Students in child psychology are wont to classify 
and catalogue in order the various manifestations 
of this social instinct of childhood, but as we have 
already seen, it is difficult to catalogue a child. 
Generally speaking, however, he starts his social 
career with a playmate. He can't count much 
beyond two, and a third party seems an intrusion. 
We have watched the children — the little children 
— beneath our window. A little boy and girl are 
playing together. Another little girl comes eagerly 
along to join them. She perhaps has "paired off" 
with each of them yesterday, so she feels confident 
of welcome. She is met with such inhospitable 
remarks as, "We do n't want you," and "You can't 
play with us." She goes sadly and sulkily away. 
Our first impulse is to compel the little snobs to 
welcome her, but our experience with compulsory 
welcomes should teach us better. They do not in- 
tend to be mean, but their heaven this morning 
depends on "me and my playmate." They can't 
count beyond two. As the preachers frequently tell 
us, sometimes men and women in mature life can't 
count much beyond four. 

The child learns from his playmate. His vision 
127 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

is corrected by hers. That is a lifelong lesson. It 
runs way up into the question of Bible interpre- 
tation. What else does that text mean, "No 
prophecy is of private interpretation?" It means 
that one man does n't know it all — that one man 
can't see it all. The child had never noticed how 
much the daisies looked like little suns until she 
showed him. He will tell his mother all about it 
to-night. Perhaps she has n't noticed it, either. 
And his playmate did n't know you could make a 
chain out of dandelion stems. His big sister told 
him and showed him how; and he knows all about 
it, although somehow they won't stick together for 
him. Thus they learn things from each other out 
there in the green yard beneath the blue sky. But 
in exchanging information about things they are 
doing more than that — that unconscious, subtle in- 
terplay of spirit, of influence of soul upon soul is 
enriching the life of each like the pollen the bees 
lug around from flower to flower. 

But while we are thinking of these things we 

hear a new kind of sound from the yard. We 

look out; the child and his playmate are looking 

at each other with blazing eyes, their childish voices 

128 



THE OTHER CHILD 

ring out angrily. And presently we see the play- 
mate go sturdily and defiantly homeward and the 
child is alone. He looks rather "sheepish" and feels 
rather awkward, we can see. He plucks off some 
daisy heads rather savagely, and then sits down 
glumly and gloomily in the sun on the doorstep. 
He is learning some more things from the other 
child. She is n't as nice as he thought she was — 
and he has to admit he is n't, either. There 's 
something in him that is hot and naughty. It is 
our social life and our social failures that reveal 
to us our dire need of the grace of God, even more 
than the meditation of the cloister. When the min- 
ister talks next Sunday about needing the help of 
the Christ to love our neighbors as ourselves, the 
child will understand what he means. 

But another sound beneath the window arouses 
us from our reveries. It is a peal of merry laughter. 
Something has happened while we were not look- 
ing. The child and his playmate are together 
again. They have "made up." Each side surren- 
dered without much fuss because each wanted the 
other. They probably did n't even say "Forgive 
me?" or "I apologize." He just called out over the 
9 129 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

fence, "Come over and see this hoppy toad" — and 
felt better in his soul as soon as he said it. She said : 
"All right. Mamma gave me a cooky, and I 'm 
going to give you half of it," and came smiling 
over. This, too, is a lifelong lesson. It touches the 
child's soul. He is learning early that lesson of 
the years, that there is nothing that sweetens the 
life of his spirit like "forgiving and being forgiven." 
God grant he may never forget it! 

As the years unfold the child learns to count 
beyond two. It is no longer just "my playmate." 
It is "we boys," or, as he perhaps expresses it in 
ungrammatical but expressive slang, "us kids." He 
develops the "gang spirit." The spirit that makes 
social organizations, the spirit that through the long 
years has made nations and empires, the spirit that, 
sanctified and baptized with blood, made the Church 
of the living God, begins to wax hot in the child 
soul. He wants to belong to something and wear a 
badge. His little playmate is deserted, but she 
does n't mind it, for she is one of "us girls" now. 
The same spirit flames up in her heart. Loyalty 
and chivalry bloom naturally now in the garden 
of the child's heart. 

130 



THE OTHER CHILD 

The appeal of the Christian Church thus be- 
comes increasingly strong and timely. The writer 
remembers how he felt when as a lad of eleven he 
became a member of the Christian Church. As 
he turned away from the altar a silver-haired Chris- 
tian man — now long years in glory— grasped him by 
the hand and called him "Brother." The feeling 
that welled up in his soul then was sort of a right- 
eous pride. He was one of the "brethren." Meth- 
odists had not fallen into the degenerate habit of 
"Mistering" fellow Church members and "brother- 
ing" fellow lodge members. It meant something 
to be a "brother," and this lad knew it. He be- 
longed. He was in it. It was his Church and his 
minister. 

As the years still blossom and fruit, the child 
soul learns the possibility of retaining both the "my 
playmate" spirit and the "gang spirit" — perhaps he 
learns the rich possibility of friendship within the 
gang — or that other blessed freak of child souls 
which after all breaks up our exclusiveness and 
priggishness of friendship outside of his particular 
gang. What a long list of comedies and tragedies 
all through history have been caused thereby! 
131 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

Happy the child soul who finds in the early 
years at least one friend— who knows him well, 
with his faults as well as his virtues, but loves him 
still and continues to be his friend through the 
stormy years— for next to the fellowship of the 
great Divine Friend is the blessing of human friend- 
ship. Our souls are richer and broader and clearer 
visioned and sweeter toned because of it, and "there 
are no friends like the old friends." 



132 



CHAPTER XX 
The Child and His Dreams 

Up in the attic where I slept 

When I was a boy, a little boy, 
In through the lattice the moonlight crept, 
Bringing a tide of dreams that swept 
Over the low, red trundle bed, 
Bathing the tangled, curly head, 
While moonbeams played at hide and seek 
With the dimples on the sun-browned cheek, 

When I was a boy, a little boy. 

And O the dreams — the dreams I dreamed 

When I was a boy, a little boy, 
For the grace that through the lattice streamed 
Over my folded eyelids seemed 
To have the gift of prophecy 
And bring me glimpses of times to be, 
When manhood's clarion seemed to call — 
Ah! that was the sweetest dream of all, 

When I was a boy, a little boy. 

These words from the magic pen of Eugene Field 
will find a responsive chord in many a heart. 
Where do they come from, those dreams of child- 
hood? Not so much the ones that come at night, 
133 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

but the one that came by day when a purple haze 
hangs over the mountains and lazy summer time 
mantles the golden earth! 

There was that boy Joseph, in the olden times, 
who persisted in having dreams of the wonderful 
days to be. His good old father, forgetful of the 
fact that he had done some dreaming himself in 
his day, fell into the age-long habit of matter-of- 
fact parents and said in effect, "Nonsense, child, 
do n't be foolish." His jealous older brothers were 
cruel in their opposition — but still he kept dream- 
ing, and his after-life was almost a literal fulfillment 
of his childhood dreams. 

We suppose a storm of criticism would come 
from very pious people if we should speak of the 
boyhood dreams of the boy Samuel. "Why, God 
spoke to Samuel!" they would exclaim. And yet 
we suppose these very same people would say, if 
Johnny or Mary told of things that came to them 
as clearly as if a voice spoke in the night, "Non- 
sense, child, you are dreaming." It took some time 
to prove whether Samuel was dreaming or not. 
Perhaps the years may prove whether some of the 
voices that speak to little folks now, whether some 
134 



THE CHILD AND HIS DREAMS 

of the things that sail into their puzzled brains 
from an unknown sea are harbingers of years to be. 

We know a lad who, from the first time he 
attended Church, when he was four years old, 
never thought of himself in the glorious days of 
manhood yet to be as anything but a Christian 
minister. It was not the whim of the child who 
wants to be a soldier one day and a storekeeper 
the next. It was a deep feeling, a settled cer- 
tainty that never left him. When he played with 
the other children and, after the manner of child- 
hood, posed as "butcher, baker, and Indian chief," 
underneath it all was always the feeling, "I am 
just playing this; I am really to be a minister." 

One day as a schoolboy he visited some great, 
empty ice-houses. He was alone. As he stepped 
into the great, dark building with the afternoon 
sunlight stealing in through the cracks in the boards, 
a feeling of awe came over him — and then immedi- 
ately the empty ice-house seemed to him like a 
great church. He could almost hear the deep 
tones of the organ pealing out, solemnly, the praise 
of God. His mind quickly pictured a quiet, rever- 
ent company, sitting silently before him, and he 
135 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

was the preacher. It was more than a play — it 
was a dream like Joseph's. We almost dare to 
say it was a voice like that which came to Samuel. 
As he came out into the April day, there was a 
choking at his throat and great waves of feeling 
too deep for words swept over him. 

One day he was in the granary and saw kernels 
of corn scattered over the floor. In a flash he saw 
the likeness to a picture in the history of Meth- 
odism of the out-door throng listening to Jesse 
Lee. In a moment again a great throb of eager- 
ness came to his boyish soul. He, too, some day 
would break the bread of life to a hungering mul- 
titude. 

And so it was ever. Sometimes indeed it settled 
down on him so heavily that it seems to him now 
his childhood was hardly normal — that he was so 
eager to get on to this one thing he did n't see even 
the flowers growing in the beautiful valley of child- 
hood. To-day, humbly but conscientiously and 
eagerly, he is a preacher of the gospel of Jesus 
Christ. And he mentions this experience here, not 
because it is unique, but because he has a feeling 
it has many duplicates. 

136 



THE CHILD AND HIS DREAMS 

Do coming events cast their shadows over the 
sensitive soul of childhood? Does God tell the 
child sometimes something of His plan for his life? 

But we can already hear the protest of the man 
whose disappointed life has seemed to mock the 
dreams of his youth. Many there are who, on 
account of circumstances over which they have no 
control, never come to their own in this life. Of 
these Thomas Gray was thinking as he walked in 
the village cemetery, among the graves of the vil- 
lage dead, and wrote: 

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid 

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire, 
Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed 

Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre. 
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page 

Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll; 
Chill penury repressed their noble rage, 

And froze the genial current of the soul. 

To the protest of the disappointed man we reply 
that his life is not yet over. Earth's pilgrimage 
is very short. Eternity is very long. Therefore, 
despise not the beckoning hands and whispering 
voices that stirred your child soul in the morning 
years. You may yet find that the dream was a 
vision. 137 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

We are not building a theology on the dreams 
of the child — not even a psychology — but we do 
not feel like tramping heavily in, like the man Haw- 
thorne describes, whose head was hard as an iron 
boiler, and endeavoring to settle the question by 
saying "Pooh!" which after all is not a very pro- 
found argument or brilliant remark, for it may be 
that these dreams are another manifestation of the 
fact that the child soul is built as Bishop Fowler 
said the early home of Abraham Lincoln was con- 
structed, "side open toward the Infinite." Very 
tenderly we say, as we see the thoughtful child with 
the far-away look in his wistful eyes: "Let alone. 
Let us see what will come of his dreams." 



138 



CHAPTER XXI 

Growing Pains 

A small boy, whose active legs were aching one 
night, said to his father, "What makes my legs 
ache?" The father replied, with a twinkle in his 
eye, "One leg has grown a little longer than the 
other; you are having growing pains, my boy." 

The child's soul has growing pains. He begins 
to climb out of the happy valley of childhood. The 
sky is farther off than he thought it was. Life 
is less golden. He learns to doubt. He doubted 
once before: It was a long time ago; his mother, 
busy with home cares and a little anxious withal, 
did not seem to pay much attention to him for 
awhile. And little skeptic that he was, he said to 
himself, "Mother does n't love me." His brother 
heard him and told on him. He soon found out 
his mistake. 

Now his doubts are not so easily dispelled. He 
doubts the Lord, not earnestly and heart-brokenly, 
but just in sort of a cool, shaky way. There are 
139 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

so many strange things out there — he doesn't look 
so eagerly and trustingly up above the tree-tops. 

Then, his childhood's philosophy has had a 
shock or two. Invisible things are not so real. 
He cares more about externals. What the other 
fellows say looms up. He is afraid of the gang. 
Then, there is already stirring in his breast a world- 
old feeling. The young lady across the way has 
an influence over him quite disproportionate with 
her character or her ability. 

We are speaking in the masculine gender be- 
cause the fashion of the English language requires 
it when using the singular number; perhaps also 
because the author of this book is a man; but we 
are persuaded and assured that the same is true of 
the opposite sex. 

There are doubtless physiological reasons for 
some of these changes. The body of the boy is 
becoming that of a man ; the body of a girl is grow- 
ing into that of a woman. Brain and soul feel 
the transformation. There are also psychological 
changes. The developing and unfolding mind is 
having growing pains. 

The train has left behind forever the little sta- 
140 



GROWING PAINS 

tion on life's railroad called "Childhood." It was 
a beautiful station, and flowers grew all around it. 
The next station is "Youth." Some call it "ado- 
lescence," but what 's the use of talking in Latin 
when Saxon will do as well? The young traveler 
knows little about this station, but everybody he 
has talked with from that town says it is wonder- 
ful. So he is eager to go. The train does not go 
fast enough to suit him. In later years he wonders 
at his eagerness. He wishes he could take the 
journey over again. He would not hurry so. He 
would gather more flowers to take with him. What 
if they do wither? there is fragrance in them. 

The temptations of this period are increasingly 
dangerous. Sin, instead of looking to be the dread- 
ful thing it used to seem, has a sort of wild fas- 
cination for him. The little world of childhood 
looks commonplace. The wanderlust rages like a 
fever within him. The supreme confidence in his 
parents and teachers is shaken. They do n't know 
it all. He does n't yet, but will soon. He is n't 
so sure of the Bible as he was. There are so many 
things that have been told him concerning which 
he is now doubtful. He must find out himself. 
141 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

Some fallacies regarding this time we would 
protest against. One is that the soul must sin — 
that it is necessary for the youth to find out by 
bitter experience the sort of husks prodigals feed 
on — that he will be a better man because of it. 
One is never better for doing wrong. Innocence 
is like the down on the wings of the butterfly. It 
is made to stay on and not to rub off. The child 
need never lose it, nor cease for a single moment 
to be a Christian. 

But while it is not necessary nor desirable for 
the youth to sin, nor even to backslide, it is also 
not possible for him to go back to the unquestioning 
piety that his soul drank in with the peaceful joys 
of simple childhood. The railroad of life runs 
trains in only one direction. 

What, then, shall he do? We answer, the 
period of his consecration has come. It is now for 
him to decide whether he will choose to follow 
the Christ of his childhood. The gospel call rings 
in his ears. The Holy Spirit speaks to his soul. 
The decisions of the child years have been made 
almost unconsciously. He has come to his full con- 
sciousness. He stands at the fork of the roads. 
142 



GROWING PAINS 

His manhood is before him. With the gracious 
atmosphere of the Christian Church around him, 
with the course of his habits already fixed by the 
years of his Christian childhood, it is almost pre- 
determined what his choice will be: and yet into 
that choice he throws every faculty of his awakened 
soul and dawning manhood. 

If there is a revival service in the Church, or a 
Decision Day in the Sunday school, that becomes 
the motive power and the providential occasion of 
his choice and consecration. He is getting out in 
the world, and his soul calls for a public confession. 

Sometimes his mother or his Sunday school 
teacher flutters around and says: "Why! he has 
been a Christian boy for years. What does this 
mean?" Frequently, in the glow of feeling and 
enthusiasm over his new choice, he makes the mis- 
take of looking with doubt or disdain on those early 
years and says: "I did n't know what I was doing 
then. Now I understand. Now I am a Christian!" 
Never mind, as the years go by he can get himself 
classified and catalogued. The important thing now 
is for him to be true to the light that shines from 
heaven onto his pathway and to find out 
143 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

How near is grandeur to our dust, 

How close is God to man, 
When the voice of duty whispers, "Thou must," 

The youth replies, "I can!" 

The appeal of the higher Christian life is timely 
at this milestone on the road. That furnishes a 
logical connection between his early Christian life 
and the more excellent way opening before him now. 
But after all the important thing is not the label, 
but the life! 

B. Fay Mills tells of an old lady who was seen 
going through the streets of a city carrying a pan 
of fire and a pitcher of water. When asked what 
she was going to do, she replied, "With this water 
I mean to quench hell, and with this fare I mean 
to burn heaven, that people may be good not for 
selfish reasons, but for goodness' own sake." Of 
course, that parable is based on a crude, unethical, 
and unscriptural conception of heaven, but its clos- 
ing ideal, "goodness for goodness' own sake," is the 
call that appeals to the altruistic years of dawning 
youth. In addition to this, the call to service meets 
with warm and eager approval. His young soul 
glows with chivalry and aches to be useful. That 
144 






GROWING PAINS 

summons ringing over the suffering centuries wins 
many volunteers from the young men who are 
strong. 

The Son of God goes forth to war, 

A kingly crown to gain; 
His blood-red banner streams afar. 

Who follows in his train? 
Who best can drink his cup of woe, 

Triumphant over pain, 

He follows in His train. 

When in response to his consecration and choice 
the life more abundant pours into his soul, he finds 
that with it comes a renewed love for the blessed 
familiar things of the good old days. Before that 
he felt he was growing away from his father and 
mother — now he finds himself coming naturally into 
more sympathetic fellowship with them. He was 
getting to view his Bible with suspicion; now he 
makes it his Guide-book. 

His doubts are not gone forever. As long as 
he thinks they will come; but his faith is bigger 
than his doubts, and his love and his loyalty keep 
him true. Thus does the child soul come through 
its growing pains to the soul of a youth and the 
soul of a man. 

10 145 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

The experience we have given is a typical one. 
We do not say it is universal. Souls and flowers 
grow up toward the sunlight each in his own way. 
There is no hard and fast rule for either. Many 
souls doubtless avoid the crisis we have described by 
opening their hearts day by day to the grace of God 
as the vision of manhood dawns clearer and nearer. 
In either case the child's Christian experience has 
the same relation to the Christian experience of the 
youth as the buds of May to the full-bloom roses 
of June. 



146 



CHAPTER XXII 

The Child and the Church 

Every child should belong to the Church. This 
is different from saying that every child should 
be a member of the Church, although in popular 
dialect the two statements are practically synony- 
mous. 

If we could answer easily and offhand the ques- 
tion asked in Chapter V, "What is a child?" the 
discussion of the relation of the child to the Church 
would be much simpler. If a child is a sinner he 
belongs outside the Church. If he is a Christian 
he belongs inside the Church. If he is neither, 
until he chooses to be, but a child-soul with his 
back to the east and his face to the west and the 
long pilgrimage all before him — where shall we 
place him as to his relation to the organized 
Church of our Lord Jesus Christ? 

Our answer in Methodist phraseology is that 
he is a probationer. We confess to a dislike to 
this word, however, although it has had a long 
147 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

and honorable history among us. Its present use 
in secular circles suggests a back entry rather than 
a front porch. Students placed in probation in our 
colleges are not on the way in, but on the way out. 
We hope to see some sensible General Conference 
substitute the phrase, "preparatory membership" for 
this other venerated but backslidden term. 

To sail between Scylla and Charybdis is not 
easy, but it is exhilarating and muscle-making. The 
true word in ethics, theology, and religion is usu- 
ally spoken by the man who steers his ship on that 
course. 

In the matter under discussion there are two 
dangers to be avoided. The one is that rigid ideal- 
ism which in its eagerness to preserve the spiritual 
character of the Church, builds around it a wall 
so high, so cold and forbidding that timid souls 
and child souls are everlastingly walled out. Har- 
riet Beecher Stowe makes one of her characters 
say, and somehow we feel instinctively that he is 
really speaking her own convictions: "I hold Jona- 
than Edwards to have been the greatest man since 
St. Augustine that Christianity has turned out. 
But when a great man, instead of making himself 
148 



THE CHILD AND THE CHURCH 

a great ladder for feeble folks to climb on, strikes 
away the ladder and bids them come to where he 
stands at a step, his greatness and his goodness both 
may prove unfortunate for those who come after." 

This attitude has caused many ministers' sons 
and deacons' daughters to stay outside the Church. 
To quote again from the gifted author just men- 
tioned: "Now it's a true proverb, 'Call a man a 
thief and he '11 steal ; 'give a dog a bad name and 
he '11 bite you,' tell a child he is 'a member of 
Christ, a child of God and inheritor of the King- 
dom of heaven,' and he feels to say the least civilly 
disposed toward religion." 

It is in accordance with the genius of Meth- 
odism that although her ideals of Church mem- 
bership have been high, like her Master she has 
always been tender toward young children. Her 
theological foundation has been the "unconditional 
benefits of the atonement," and with this premise 
to make them feel easy as to their orthodoxy, Meth- 
odist ministers have wisely concluded that children 
are "in the Kingdom." There is and always has 
been a wide difference of opinion as to what that 
phrase really means, but the practical result has 
149 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

been that save in a few rigid instances it has been 
made easy for the children of the Christian home 
to come into preparatory membership at least in 
the Church of Christ. And while the author of 
this book writes as a Methodist, he is aware that 
this attitude is by no means peculiar to his denom- 
ination, and before a single Wesleyan itinerant 
threaded his way in the American wilderness the 
Cambridge platform had declared that the child 
of the faithful is "already a member in the Church 
of Christ, in covenant with God, and so, if not re- 
generate, is yet in a more hopeful way of attaining 
regeneration and all spiritual blessings, both of the 
covenant and real." 

And the students of Church history tell us that 
when the Puritans were making this platform they 
were using old and well-seasoned timber, that from 
the very beginning it has been a part of the Chris- 
tian strategy of the Church to capture households 
and families for the Christ and the Kingdom. 

We borrow this term, "Christian strategy," from 

the discussion of this subject by Dr. Olin A. Curtis 

in his "Christian Faith," and we insert here as the 

summary of what we have endeavored to say and 

150 



THE CHILD AND THE CHURCH 

as a clear statement of what we believe the fathers, 
consciously or unconsciously, meant when they 
spoke of children as "in the Kingdom" these words 
from this same book: "These helpless and unde- 
veloped and innocent children the Church has a 
right to claim as her own wards to bring them 
up on the inside of the rich life of the holy cath- 
olic Church." 

In thus bringing them up, however, we believe 
that our point must be sacredly guarded. No man 
can be a Christian by proxy. No man — no child — 
can be a Christian unless he chooses to be. The 
gracious Spirit of God will not break into a child 
soul. He respects the awful fact that the child is 
the keeper of his own castle. The Christ will not 
intrude. He stands at the door and knocks. 

That is why we have called the child a pro- 
bationer rather than a member of the Christian 
Church. And we are aware that in saying proba- 
tioner we are using that historic word in a differ- 
ent sense from that which is common among us, 
a difference that the Methodist Discipline recog- 
nizes and requires pastors to report baptized chil- 
dren in a separate list from those enrolled because 
151 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

they have a desire to flee from the wrath to come 
and to be saved from their sins. We are not par- 
ticular as to names or labels ; what we mean is, that 
the Church is to be in a peculiar sense the mother, 
protector, and teacher of the little children who 
flock its portals or wander shepherdless on the 
neighboring hills, and that is all we do mean. That 
is as far as the Church can go without robbing the 
child soul of that most Godlike possession, his per- 
sonal freedom. Dr. Henry C. Sheldon says: 
"After generous room has been conceded to the 
charitable assumption that the child trained in 
Christian teachings will become in spirit and truth 
a disciple of Christ, his own choice and line of con- 
duct should be allowed to determine his standing 
as being within or without the circle of Church- 
fellowship proper." 

We are very eager that Methodism shall not 
let its passion for statistical size allow it to be 
superficial at this point. Children love to join 
things. They like to dress in white and go in 
throngs. If we believed as do the sacerdotal 
Churches in the inherent power of the sacraments 
to transform and sanctify, we could consistently 
152 



THE CHILD AND THE CHURCH 

marshal them at our altars regardless of their pres- 
ent spiritual experience, if we believed as do the 
so-called liberal Churches, that a subjective religious 
experience is unnecessary, we might do likewise; 
but if the Master's requirement of the birth from 
above is still our watchword and our passion, in 
building the temple of our God we must, like the 
saintly Theodore L. Cuyler, "handle each stone 
separately" and insist that each child soul shall have 
personally appropriated his heritage in grace before 
becoming an enrolled member of the Church mili- 
tant. 

We are not kind to the child if by refusing to 
insist upon their necessity we rob him of his vision 
of those saving experiences in grace which must 
ever be the foundation of the Christian certainty 
of thoughtful souls. It is better to keep him wait- 
ing at the portals of the Church until he "sees the 
light." 



*53 



CHAPTER XXIII 

The Child in the Church 

In our last chapter we left the child "waiting at 
the Church." The Church of Christ has not done 
its duty by the child or ministered unto him as 
beautifully as it is its divine privilege to minister 
if it is content merely to tell him the lofty truths 
concerning which we have spoken, and then leave 
him to decide the matter for himself, unhelped. 
Such a course would be contrary to the whole 
genius of Christianity, whose Christ came all the 
way to Calvary not only to make possible our sal- 
vation, but also to help us decide right the question 
that makes our fate. 

The writer confesses to have entered the Chris- 
tian ministry with a prejudice against infant bap- 
tism. The emphasis upon the ethical and volitional 
that have always seemed to him so vitally and eter- 
nally important, made him not feel so cordial 
toward a rite in which the person most vitally con- 
cerned could not voluntarily participate. However, 
154 






THE CHILD IN THE CHURCH 

a saintly teacher, the late Samuel F. Upham, of 
blessed memory, said frequently to his classes, and 
the writer listened eagerly, as he did to all that 
fell from the lips of that prophet: "I shall never 
forget how, when I was a naughty boy, my mother 
would take me in her arms and say to me: 'You 
must not be bad. You are God's little boy. I gave 
you to Him in holy baptism;' and it has followed 
me all my life." Dr. Upham was well up toward 
the threescore years and ten when he uttered those 
words and his brow was crowned with snow, but 
his voice choked and the tears ran down his cheeks 
unrestrained — and a hush filled his class room! 
Somehow, with the memory of that hush in his soul, 
a budding young preacher would find it hard to be 
an Anabaptist. 

When he plunged into the work of eager evan- 
gelism, this young preacher soon discovered that 
those who responded first to the appeal and who 
showed the finest staying qualities after their con- 
version were those who were consecrated to God 
in holy baptism in their infancy. Therefore, he 
concludes that by this sacred rite of Christening — ■ 
let the "i" in the word be pronounced long and 
1 55 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

you see something of its beautiful significance — the 
Church of Jesus Christ can help the child soul to 
decide right. 

Just how this helps it may be impossible to ex- 
plain. There is no mechanical or chemical change 
brought about by the external rite. The water is 
not holy save as it spills into somebody's soul — 
but it usually does. Hardened indeed is the parent 
whose attitude toward his child is not made dif- 
ferent by the sacred spell of the hour. How much 
the child himself knows about it or is affected by 
it even the psychologist can not tell us. We can 
not escape the fact that the years that make our 
disposition, if not our character, are the years we 
can remember nothing about in later life — they are 
hidden in the golden mist of babyhood. If the day 
and the hour and the rite place no mark on the 
baby-soul— the influence it makes in the home in 
those early years surrounds it with a fragrance like 
that with which the lilac bush flooded the sunlit 
parlor. 

The Church of Jesus Christ should ever remem- 
ber its responsibility to the baptized children. They 
are adopted as it were by the bride of the Christ. 
156 



THE CHILD IN THE CHURCH 

They belong to her as Samuel belonged to the 
tabernacle. For them she is peculiarly responsible 
before earth and heaven. It is not enough that 
they be taught in class and Sunday school. With 
the same eagerness with which the wakeful mother 
listens until the last child comes in, the whole 
Church should eagerly seek and wistfully wait 
until every one of them by personal choice be- 
comes in life and heart a Christian. 

A minister's wife was taking her two little girls 
of seven and nine years to the communion table. 
The other children in the small chapel stared and 
smiled. The little maidens themselves smiled back 
brightly, but partook of the sacred emblems. After- 
wards one of them said to her mother, "Margaret 
laughed at us because we took the Lord's Supper." 
The mother smiled tenderly and said, "Did you 
tell her mamma said it was all right for you to do 
so?" Did that child understand fully the meaning 
of the holy sacrament? She did not. Do you, my 
esteemed and profound reader? She did under- 
stand what it meant to desire to lead a new life. 
She was in love and charity with her neighbors, 
too — which, sad to say, was a little more than could 
157 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

be said of some of the gray-haired Church members 
who walked unblushingly to the altar rail. Her 
mother, whose own soul had learned the precious- 
ness of it all, was right in thinking her little daugh- 
ters were entitled to this help in making the right 
choice and living the white life. 

In our discussion of the child's Christian ex- 
perience we said the child's conversion was the 
childhood habit of turning from sin to Christ. We 
do not say that the child should wait until this 
habit is strong with the years before he takes upon 
him the obligation of Church membership. Far 
are we from declaring that he should know all 
the visions and revelations of the Lord that are 
coming to him on earth before doing so. Then 
would it be simultaneous with his translation. As 
soon as there is a choice, that in the opinion of 
those who know children and know Christ — unless 
one knows both he is not authority on this ques- 
tion — represents a real, personal choice, which is 
sure to bring from the Christ a personal reply in 
the heart, the child is a proper candidate for 
Church membership and service. 

We have been speaking of some of the ways 
158 






THE CHILD IN THE CHURCH 

the Church can help the child to make this per- 
sonal choice. There are many more. And, most 
of all, can the Church help by counting the child 
in in all its plans and services. There is doubtless 
a need in some places for a special children's 
Church — but in reality every Church should be a 
children's Church. There is no foundation in 
Scripture or history for a Church that is merely for 
adults, any more than for a Sunday school merely 
for children. They both belong in both. We will 
help the child most not by segregating him, but 
by including him! The ordinary revival meeting 
will do him more good than the average children's 
meeting. Holy communion is better for his soul 
than the Junior League. We are not speaking 
against these institutions either. They are all good 
in their place, but "these ye ought to have done 
and not left the other undone." 

Some ministers have a habit of giving a short 
sermon to children before their usual Sunday morn- 
ing discourse. This is proper and sometimes de- 
sirable — although it would be just as proper and 
perhaps just as desirable to give a special sermon 
to young men or old ladies in the same way. Gen- 
159 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

erally speaking, every sermon should be a children's 
sermon. The child won't understand all of it — 
but neither will the trustees. The child may un- 
derstand some parts of it the trustees do not. He 
may keep awake better! A sermon that is over 
the heads of the children is apt to be over the 
heads of everybody else; in the opinion of every- 
body except the preacher it may really be under 
their heels, dealing with geology instead of life. 
The Sermon on the Mount is as intelligible to the 
primary department as to the adult Bible class. 

If minister and Church, possessed of the spirit 
of the Christ, to whose garments the little children 
clung, will devote themselves to helping the children 
each for himself to decide to open his heart to the 
Christ-life and follow in His steps, we will not find 
many of them lingering outside the portals of the 
Christian Church. 



1 60 



CHAPTER XXIV 

The Church and the Child 

A beautiful little girl, now in heaven, was show- 
ing a stranger around her home town ; that stran- 
ger will be well content if he finds this same 
gracious and kindly ministering one waiting to show 
him over the heavenly city. As they passed a 
white wooden building with its upward-pointing 
spire the child said, with an air of happy pro- 
prietorship, "That is our church." 

It is fine when a child feels that the church 
belongs to her, just as her father belongs to her, or 
her home. To really deserve that rare tribute from 
childish lips the Church should do several things 
for the child which we will here enumerate. ( I ) 
// should teach the child reverence. It is hardly 
natural for humanity to be reverent. Almighty 
God had to keep a perpetual thunder shower going 
on top of Mt. Sinai to get the children of Israel 
in a proper frame of mind while He gave them 
His law. This present generation with its roaring 
" 161 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

democracy is not prone to be reverent. Unless the 
child soul learns it somewhere, he can not come to 
his own spiritual heritage. Moreover, the land of 
to-morrow will be lawless, homeless, flagless, and 
godless. The Church or the representative of the 
Christ should teach the child soul this lesson. 

Art and architecture will help. Let modern 
church builders read Exodus and Leviticus before 
they go on building music halls and barns in which 
to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. 

As Frederic Knowles says: 

Our lips shall have no sneer 

For the spire, the mosque, the ark; 

Broken symbols shall be dear 

If they point us through the dark. 

The attitude of the worshipers will have even 
more to do in creating an atmosphere of reverence. 
Some of us can remember the communion service 
in an old Congregational meeting-house, bare of 
furnishings and of ritual, yet as the white cloth 
was uncovered and the deacon walked solemnly 
around there was a silence only broken by our own 
beating hearts. The sin of Protestantism to-day 
is irreverence. It starts with the minister and or- 
162 



THE CHURCH AND THE CHILD 

ganist and choir and ends on the back seats. The 
child soul is taking it all in. Let us all go forward 
for prayers and do better! 

(2) // should instruct the child in the truths 
of the Bible. We are not thinking now of the 
pulpit — although it might be well if American 
preachers should not worry over the reporters so 
much, get over being topic-mad, and like the mas- 
terly expositors across the sea, be content to open 
up the Scriptures. 

"The Sunday school is the Church specializing 
in the work of teaching." We heard this remark 
at a convention and wrote it down in our memory. 
We would add, "teaching the Bible." 

We hear some things said about employing paid 
teachers to do this. We have seen some of these, 
and heard of more. That teacher who said to her 
pastor with a glowing face, "The last of my pupils 
has now come to Jesus," was a paid teacher. She 
had opened up a heavenly bank account. 

We believe, after all, this is the best kind of 

paid teachers. We do not need specialists as much 

as we need folks who are showing how the gospel 

truths work in everyday life. An intelligent knowl- 

163 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

edge of the conclusions of higher criticism may be 
a good thing for the teacher to possess, but a saving 
knowledge of how the promises of God work is 
better. The real weakness of the preacher's appeal 
is that he is paid for making it. It is necessary in 
his case, but the least professionalism we can get 
along with tends to fruitfulness and peace. There- 
fore, let those who live in Berea continue to count 
it a priceless privilege to teach a little child the 
Holy Scriptures. 

(3) It should furnish the child a wholesome 
social environment. It should supply him with his 
books and his chums. It is as natural for him to be 
sociable as religious. He will look for social life 
somewhere. The devil has an abundant supply of 
emissaries ready to entertain him. This is where 
the Junior League should come in — and all the other 
clean, bright, wholesome, sociable things invented 
by consecrated brains. 

Is a word of caution necessary? Perhaps not, 
but we can not forbear saying that the child does 
not need silly things to interest him. It is grown-up 
men and women who like to try to pretend that 
they are young who revel in "donkey parties." The 
164 



THE CHURCH AND THE CHILD 

child finds that which gives him a finer outlook 
on this wonderful world more fascinating, and need- 
less to say it is more appropriate for the Church 
to deal in that sort of articles. A good friend, an 
awakening book, a finer sense of refinement, a 
stronger purpose to be good for something — these 
are the pearls that should be passed around to chil- 
dren at Church sociables. 

(4) 77 should minister to his spiritual nature. 
This, of course, most of all. It should not rest — 
meaning its members — should not rest until the 
children of its constituency and the shepherdless 
children beyond are brought into saving fellowship 
with Jesus Christ. This is old-fashioned, but it 
is infinitely important. The very plastic character 
of the child's mind and heart is pathetic in its 
appeal. Let us prayerfully engrave this on our 
hearts. 

(5) It should offer an opportunity for the ex- 
pression of the child's religious life. We have 
already entered our plea for the child's rights in 
the Church services. They are his. Let him feel 
it and know it. Let the children sing "Hosannah." 



165 



CHAPTER XXV 

Postlude 

Who can consider the child soul, the child world, 
and the child dreams without being homesick? We 
exclaim with the poet: 

Backward, turn backward, ye hours, in your flight; 
Make me a child again just for to-night. 

The world seems rough and desert. Even its 
applause is empty, its honors tinsel, and we long 
to pillow our hot heads in mother's lap and feel 
her cool hand on our brow. 

We want a drink of water from the well at 
Bethlehem. We want to go "back to Griggsby's 
Station, where we used to be so happy and so poor." 
We want the old-fashioned flowers, the old- 
fashioned joys, and the old-fashioned friends of 
auld lang syne. But*^ 

All are scattered now and fled, 
Some are married, some are dead, 
And when I ask with throbs of pain 
Ah ! when shall they all meet again 

1 66 



POSTLUDE 

As in the days long since gone by? 
The ancient timepiece makes reply, 

"Forever — never, 

Never — forever." 



This is a lonesome spot to close a book. There- 
fore, bashfully, like an amateur singer at a concert, 
but with the consciousness of having a song we 
fain would sing, we pen here the words which well 
up from our own mind and heart and give us peace : 

When in other lands we wander, 
And in distant paths we roam, 

How our hearts grow warm and tender 
When at night we think of home ! 

And the hills we loved in childhood 

Seem to charm us from afar, 
As they did when o'er their summits 

We beheld the evening star. 

Our lives are but a journey 

Round the circle, through the glen, 

And when shadows fall at even 
We shall all come home again. 

In the dear home paths we '11 wander, 
And the years that took their flight 

In our joy will be forgotten 
When we all get home at night. 

I6 7 



THE SOUL OF A CHILD 

And the Father, who has missed us 
When so weary we did roam, 

And the Savior, who has loved us, 
Will receive us, "Welcome Home. 



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